Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

Yes, I am.

I wanted to talk to you about coping with your life when it hits the accelerator.

Now, long ago, literally weeks ago, I was talking to you about measuring babies.

I now have this personal experience of measuring a baby.

We took our very own baby to be measured this last week, and it's not easy.

You have to stretch the babies.

They don't like being stretched. They're actively resistant

to it. Anyway, I was recalling, having seen this documentary about how babies don't grow it all

for weeks on end and then suddenly grow like an inch overnight. Seriously, an inch overnight, like two centimeters.

And when they are going through these periods of rapid growth,

they're really cranky and fussy.

And I compared that to the way

punctuated equilibrium has brought people forth

from the so-called lower animals in evolution.

We went into a lot of places.

Well, this week, you're going to hear a lot about child development for me in the next little

while.

This week, our five-week old baby here in our family hit something called the developmental leap.

Yes, she's five weeks old, five weeks and change.

And apparently they come in and they're like, they can't really focus their eyes except from like eight to 11 inches away.

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