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As she often does, Abby fell asleep nursing the other night. As her sleep deepened, she got that little bit heavier, as sleeping babies do. Her tongue occasionally flashed over her lower lip, maybe trying to catch the little bit of milk that had slipped out the corner of her mouth.

I set aside the Boppy and just held her for a bit, kissing her sweet-smelling head and running my finger over her cheek as she slept. She curled up a bit, resting her head on my chest and snuggling into my arms. I realized again how quickly she’s growing - how short a time I’ll have her this small. I sat and rocked her and thought to myself that I never want to forget that feeling.

I want to somehow memorize every bit of how it feels to hold her when she’s this small, this trusting, and this dependent on me so that I can call it up instantly when she’s pushing me away, rushing to be independent and grownup and separate and anything other than my perfect, sweet baby girl.

You know that phrase, “the hurrieder I go, the behinder I get”? Yeah. No matter how much you shovel, you know you’re destined to stay behind, because it’s snowing faster than you could possibly shovel?

Greg Knauss knows that feeling, too. In The Back-Logged Life, he tells us how he’s dealing with the seemingly endless to-do lists and bottomless inbox. He raises an interesting point: how important is all that stuff, really?

Is the sense of futility that we get from our crammed inboxes and lengthy email queues an inevitable byproduct of the wired world we live in? Are the two (or three or four) phone lines and multiple email addresses we all have making our lives more complicated and less effective than the old single number, no call-waiting, no voicemail lives we used to live? Used to be that I was either here or I wasn’t - now I get the same message on my home phone and my cell phone, and they’re often followed up by an email…letting me know that you left me voicemail.