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I shouldn’t have worried that Abby would have trouble finding a way to sit up without some convenient assistive device to use. It also shouldn’t surprise me that already she’s finding her own way of doing things. What sounds impossible - or at least unlikely - is all too often exactly how she’s decided things will be. Sitting up is no exception.

Most babies, I’m told, achieve “sitting” from “laying down” by pushing to one side and using their legs for leverage to swing up into a sitting position. Sometimes they’ll roll onto their sides and push up from there. Does Abby use either of those methods? Of course not. She rolls onto her stomach first, then pushes herself up completely into a cobra pose like a little yoga baby. So far, not so strange, right? But then she walks her hands back towards her body, while at the same time pulling her legs around the outside - through a split - until she’s pushed herself back onto her butt and her legs have swung all the way around to the front. Every now and then she just bends her knees instead and sits back between her feet, but at least one leg is almost always pulled straight around.

I am trying desperately to get the whole thing on film, and (of course) failing completely. It’s one of those things that you have to see to really appreciate.

Well, that was depressing. How about some happier news to knock that off the top of the page?

I’ve been starting to wonder a bit whether Abby is every going to crawl. It’s not that she’s not mobile - far from it, she can roll anywhere she wants to go, faster than you’d think possible. But she’s not crawling, and I sometimes think that she’ll be one of those babies who go straight from rolling to walking. But before she can crawl, she needs to figure out how to get from lying down to sitting up on her own - something else she

couldn’t do yet.

I put her down for a nap earlier and as she sometimes does (or, uh, doesn’t) she wasn’t falling asleep. She was playing happily, so I let her be - I have a “one hour minimum if you’re not screaming bloody murder” stay-in-the-crib-at-naptime policy. I glanced at the video monitor every now and then to see whether she was settling in or still playing, and after an hour or so, what did I see? My baby girl, sitting in the middle of the crib, just looking around the room and smiling at the camera!

I don’t know how quickly she’ll figure out a way to manage that feat without the bars of the crib to use for leverage, but it’s one more milestone she’s crossed off her list on the way to fame and fortune.

For 2,973 people, the last five years in our nation’s history have been a memoriam of sorts. Actions taken in their collective name; angry words spoken on their behalf. Actions they never asked for; words they never spoke. What would they have done, given the chance? What would they have said, if we could listen?

“I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.”
- H.L. Mencken

For each innocent life taken five years ago, another has been taken in an unlikely matchmaking - 2,974 U.S. military service members have been killed in Iraq and in the so-called “war on terror” to date.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”
- Voltaire

Almost six thousand lives gone. Six thousand flames of unknowable potential, snuffed needlessly too soon. Six thousand sons and daughters. Six thousand sisters. brothers. Six thousand mothers. fathers. husbands. wives. best friends. soul mates. Every one was someone’s baby. Every one was someone’s world. Every one deserved so much better.

“We have guided missiles and misguided men.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.