Two, Count 'Em Two, Splendid Nieces

Dan and I are back from meeting his new niece Eleanor. She is all of three weeks old. At the moment, Eleanor's main accomplishments are lifting her head a bit if she's lying on her stomach, grunting, and, possibly, preferring being held by her father over being held by other men. Or maybe she just found her Uncle Dan's sweater to be itchy. It's kind of hard to tell. From the nose up, Eleanor is the spitting image of Dan's sister--so much so that, every time she furrowed her brow in puzzlement, we all cracked up, because we'd seen exactly that same brow-furrowing before. Visiting the Davises meant keeping quiet a lot, so as to avoid waking the baby.

Visiting my folks was livelier. Lively, perhaps verging on manic. My sister's little nuclear family is still living with my parents, while everyone waits for the contractors to rebuild her tornado-flattened house. So there they still are--four strong-willed adults, four dogs, and a toddler, all under one roof. Perhaps because my niece has so many adults to dote on her, little Kate is about four or five months' worth of verbally precocious. A typical fourteen-month-old's vocabulary consists of: Mommy, Daddy, bottle. After Kate's vocabulary hit 35 words, Pru and Zach stopped counting. Now, she can repeat almost any word after hearing it once, and she often guesses the meaning right and remembers after the first try. She has verbs--eat, feed, touch, stop, walk, dance, drum. It's not that surprising that she can say, "Don't touch," or even that she can say it in both English and Portuguese (her occasional day care provider is from Brazil). What's surprising is that, if you say in a cheery voice, "Katherine, don't touch," she will stand still and point, from a respectful distance, at all the things in the room that she already knows she's not allowed to touch, starting with her former favorite, the television screen. At restaurants, if the waitress asks if she can bring anything more, Kate will fix the waitress with her gaze and say, "More rice!"

Best, absolutely best of all, is that she has the word raining. It's not something to eat. It's not something to grasp in her hand. It's not a verb that she can do herself, or that anyone in particular can do to or for her. It's not even something that happens all that often, where she lives. The noun, rain, is not what interests her. It's raining, the state of things, a condition the universe takes on.

Like most things in Kate's life, raining is an occasion for laughing with delight.

Time To Register For The March Writer's Weekend Event

This March, A Writer's Weekend will be holding its first East Coast event. All of you guys who said you'd definitely go, if only the conference weren't so far away, well, this is your chance.

We'll have a two-day program, March 24th and 25th, at the University Inn and Conference Center on the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It's a charming little site, accessible by public transportation from...well, actually, from anywhere. Start in Zimbabwe if you really want to, and I can still give you directions to the Inn that don't involve having to drive. New Brunswick is about 45 minutes outside NYC by train, about an hour outside NYC by car, and about 5 minutes from Exit Nine on the New Jersey Turnpike.

The Inn is about 15 minutes from my front door, which is one of the many reasons I'll be on the volunteer staff.

The price has come down since the initial wave of planning. If you join the organization ($20 gets you a year of informative newsletters and discounts on all events), you can register at the member price of $130.

The list of speakers is shaping up nicely. The editors and agents currently on the program are worth the trip already, but I have it on good authority that there are a few more editors and agents who have tentatively agreed to come, and we're just waiting for their plans to firm up before we add them to the list for all to see.

The webform is up and stable now. If you tried registering earlier and ran into a glitch, rest assured, it's fixed. I submitted my own registration form about an hour ago, to make sure it worked before I urged you all to go there.

In a fit of hubris, I just assured the conference founder that I could double the current number of registrants by the end of the month, once I posted about the conference here and in a few other places I haunt. If you were planning on attending anyway, please (pretty please?) zip over to register, and make me look good. If you weren't planning on attending anyway, but you write genre fiction of any kind, go poke around and see what the fuss is all about.