OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS: A Journal of My Son's First Year
Anne Lamott, Ballantine Books, 1993
ISBN 0-449-90928-X

This is a wonderful book.  A friend lent it to me while I was
pregnant; I read it cover-to-cover in one sitting, and have reread it
twice since my daughter was born.  I can't recommend it highly enough.
Ms. Lamott completely opens up her heart and soul and shares her life
with her son with the reader.  She doesn't let you think for one
minute that parenthood is simple or easy, but you can tell that she
loves her son more than life itself.  It's funny and touching and
beautiful. 

``The colic was very bad last night.... I can handle the crying for a
long time, but then I feel like I'm going to fall over the precipice
into total psychosis.  Last night at midnight it occurred to me to
leave him outside for the night, and if he survived, to bring him
inside in the morning.  Sort of an experiment in natural selection.

``There's so much joy and pain and love and wonder in my chest and
behind my eyes that it's like *The Unbearable Lightness of Being.*
It's like Patsy Cline's voice.

``I just can't get over how much babies cry.  I really had no idea
what I was getting into.  To tell you the truth, I thought it would be
more like getting a cat.

``His hands are like little stars.

``He falls asleep and I feel I could die of love when I watch him, and
I think to myself that he is what angels look like.  Then I doze off,
too, and it's like heaven, but sometimes only twenty minutes later he
wakes up and begins to make his gritchy rodent noises, scanning the
room wildly.  I look blearily over at him in the bassinet, and think,
with great hostility, Oh, God, he's raising his loathsome reptilian
head again.

``...he lies around and makes raspberries and plays with his feet.  He
has even stuck them in his mouth twice now.  Obviously he is an
extremely gifted baby.

``...when Sam and I are nursing, it crosses my mind that I will never
ever be willing to give this up.  It'll be okay, I think to myself, we
can get it to work, I'll follow him to college but I'll stay *totally*
out of the way.... This is the easiest, purest commmunication I've
ever known.''