“You have a spooky nose. No, you have a sharp nose. I have a sharp nose too. Daddy has a sharp nose. Julia has a sharp, little nose.”

Last night we took down the Christmas tree, and today the recyclers picked it up for mulch. We bought it from Delancey Street, so I feel like it did good deeds coming and going. It was also amazingly beautiful, festooned with lights and inexpensive ornaments from IKEA. Thank you, tree.

Claire’s language is coming along at the speed of light, and I have ridiculous nostalgia for the baby talk she no longer uses. She used to hold her arms up and say “Tawwy!” Now it’s, “I want to be carried, please.” She still says “Twick or tweet!” and “I like it the playground” and when drawing attention to something will repeat it without drawing breath, for emphasis: “A moon a moon!” But her verb forms and gender pronouns are conforming to standard English and soon her rich baby patois will disappear, the only traces of it being the tender in-jokes Jeremy and I trade.

It’s been an intense winter, what with Julia arriving and Mrs Bud dying and me setting foot in a church again. It’s pretty clear to me that I no longer believe in the virgin birth or the resurrection, if I ever did, but I do believe in the incarnation. My faith boils down to this: unto us a child is born. Any child, anywhere; every child a potential prince of peace. And even if it is, it can count on being hounded to death.

Nevertheless. Kids are the hope bombs we lob into the unknowable future, and not for ourselves alone, but for everyone we love and have loved.

Tuchman’s The Proud Tower was an exquisitely timely pick. Pesce just finished her A Distant Mirror, and I picked up Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation, which references The Proud Tower on page seven. (Claire liked The Proud Tower too. She tore into it this morning, but Jeremy fixed it with Scotch tape.)

Julia has added two new moods to asleep and surprised! – perturbation and delight. Perturbation, which is rare, is expressed in a series of stern bleats addressed to any person or persons suspected of withholding milk or cuddles. Delight is even rarer, and results in mild beaming. Mostly, though, she continues to be asleep or surprised!

So what do I do all day, with Claire at preschool and Julia sleeping contentedly in her sling? I read, and I think curmudgeonly thoughts. I caught up on what are supposed to have been some good recent novels: Empire Falls, Middlesex and The Hours. All three featured some nice unflashy realist prose that was completely undercut by wildly implausible yet cinematic deaths seventy minutes in. Literary fiction has dwindled into the film treatment.

I fled to the nineteenth century, where George Eliot took me in her arms. I haven’t read her masterpiece Middlemarch in fifteen years, and in that time I have almost completed the transition from Dorothea to (I hope) a Tertius Lydgate who made a sensible marriage. What an aggravating prig Dorothea can be. I actually feel very sorry for Casaubon, whose reach merely exceeded his grasp.

Dorothea should have married Lydgate. Would there, then, have been a novel? Lydgate’s gradual slide into debt and dishonour is brilliantly and convincingly portrayed, so much so that it made me anxious. The oddest thing about Middlemarch is that, to me, it reads more like Trollope’s best novel than anything written by the author of The Mill on the Floss or Adam Bede. I don’t mean that a woman couldn’t have written it; just that it examines Trollope’s real interests (and mine) – money and career – more than the somewhat sentimental affection for the landless that seems to dominate Eliot’s other books.

Rocket Boys was a Christmas gift from Jeremy. In the last days of this pregnancy we finally got the NetFlix queue moving again, and after three spectacularly good picks – The Station Agent, The Triplets of Belleville and The Barbarian Invasions – we watched October Sky, the film and also anagram of Rocket Boys. The script was so ploddingly awful I had to throw cushions at the TV to alleviate my impotent rage, but the book is engrossing, as much for its portrait of a dying West Virginia coal town as for the rocketry.

In order to get out, Homer Hickham had to go to college; and that basic truth underpins Locked in the Cabinet, the memoir of Robert Reich, labor secretary in the first Clinton Administration. Reich’s modest, funny, fascinating book (much better than Stephanopoulos’s All Too Human) plots the political failures of 1992-96: how deficit hawks killed Reich’s dreams of investment in job training and education to expand the skilled US workforce; how Reich’s own naivete undermined his position and left him isolated at the far left of the Cabinet; how Clinton’s early ambitions eroded before the pressure of securing re-election.

It is uncomfortable reading, especially when Reich describes the ideologues elected in the 1994 midterms. There was no negotiating with Gingrich and his cronies Armey and Delay, who came to Washington brandishing the Contract With America and determined to wrest power away from the Democrats for good. They succeeded. It was the beginning of the godawful mess we’re in now.

JFK was reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and some credit it with helping him keep his nerve. (The Bob McNamara documentary The Fog of War, another great Netflix pick, is terrifying on Cuba.) Tuchman’s The Proud Tower has a chapter on the anarchist movement at the turn of the last century, describing the theorists pressing in print for “the propaganda of the deed” and the bombers and assassins who took them at their word.

The parallels with Islamofascism (and Christofascism for that matter) – decentralized and feeding on a dispossessed and emasculated populace, practically impossible to contain – are unsettling. As Ian pointed out to me the other day, there’s no way to monitor what’s going on inside someone’s mind, and it’s amazing the kinds of havoc lone gunmen can achieve these days. Ah, progress.

Julia is awake. Julia is surprised!

“And then the dragon and the ice bat. And they went ALL the way UP in the CLOUDS. And then asleep. Then awake! Sleep. Awake! And then Mummy, and Daddy, and Cian, and Rowan, and Ada: and then they went to SCHOOL!”

Claire rocked her first day at preschool. Rowan and Ada saw her coming and swarmed over her as soon as she got in the door; she could hardly be bothered to look up from her toys to say goodbye to us.

When I went to pick her up I thought for one horrible moment that she’d fallen on asphalt and grazed her little face, but the kids had just been painting each others’ faces with blood- and bruise-coloured paint. How nice. She left willingly enough, but she was teary-eyed as I lifted her out of the car.

R: Are you sad because you’re not at school any more?

Claire nodded mournfully.

R (after a moment): Freak.

She was in a glorious mood all evening, telling stories and cuddling everything that moved: a stark contrast to recent horrors. Jeremy’s theory is that she just hadn’t been getting enough exercise over the rainy break. $DEITY bless our preschool and its lovely teachers and magical toys and ridiculously reasonable fees.

Still, it feels deeply weird to have a kid that actually likes school. Where did she come from, and why does she have my nose?

Goodbye Mrs Bud.

Julia has two main modes: asleep and surprised! We just counted down and watched the system clock change. People on the street started cheering. Julia was surprised!

Jeremy caught Claire’s tummy bug, so the last week has been kind of difficult, not to say gross. Also, I despise rain. But it wasn’t all bad. High points included having fourteen people over for Christmas lunch (Danny to Yoz and Bob, who are Jewish: “HOW DO YOU LIKE OUR CUS-TOMS?”); seeing King Kong with a fascinated Julia; and Claire saying to me last night “You’re my dragon.”

Tonight we had sushi at Yo’s, then watched an episode of House MD. Things are on the up. Feliz ano nuevo, and all that.

“And then a huge, red dragon flew in the window. It had orange wings and it breathed fire, and its name was… Matilda.”

“I wanna ride on the dragon.”

“Okay. So Claire climbed on Matilda’s back and held tight on to her orange wings.

“And Matilda flew out the window and up over Bernal Heights, with the red-tailed hawks. And beneath them they could see the microwave tower and the hospital where Julia was born.

“And Claire held on tight to Matilda’s orange wings.

“And Matilda flew north over the city and the Golden Gate Bridge, over Marin and Muir Woods and Stinson Beach and Bolinas, over Sonoma and Bodega Bay and Jenner where the sea lions sit on the sandbank at the mouth of the Russian River.

“And Claire held on tight to Matilda’s orange wings.

“And Matilda saw the Point Arena lighthouse, and so she swung down and over the mouth of the Garcia River. And she came down to land in a little pocket in the hills.

“And Patrick and Seana and Willa looked out the window of their little cabin and saw the red dragon with orange wings come in to land in the apple orchard.

“And Claire climbed off Matilda’s back, and she said hello to the chickens and the cats and the rabbits, and she picked some apples off the apple trees for her dinner.”

Claire yawns and snuggles into my arms.

“And then she climbed up the stairs, up up up up, to Newbird Cabin. And she went inside and climbed into bed and gave a huge yawn.”

Claire closes her eyes.

“And then she closed her eyes.

“And pretty soon?”

(Tiny snores.)

“She was asleep.”

This time exactly thirteen years ago I was sitting in the tower of Christ Church St Lawrence in Sydney, drinking cider with the bellringers and my dad. Twelve years ago I was at a Catholic mass in Thetford, Norfolk, with my Uncle Arthur.

Three years ago I was in labour at California Pacific Medical Center.

Tonight I took Claire and Jules to the Christmas pagaent at Holy Innocents. Claire was an angel. She wore cardboard wings and a tinsel crown with her blue velvet dress. She was so beautiful it hurt to look at her.

When we got home she started running a fever. We gave her Tylenol and she slept for a while, then woke up screaming, threw up horribly and sobbed for an hour. I held her while she cried in pain. Her hair was drenched in sweat. I was so afraid.

She’s fine. She fell asleep again and woke up cool and calm, demanding television and apple juice. Jeremy just put her to bed. Implausible resilience of the young. I’m so relieved, so glad that she’s all right, so grateful to have her, my funny brilliant rock star of a daughter.

In five minutes she’ll be three years old.

The good news: our Christmas shopping is all done now. The bad news: we just crawled over the bodies of our vanquished foes trying to get to the last toys. The bad news: we only made it as far as Cortland. The good news: our senseless waste of money benefits local merchants!

I know I keep blowing off parties, and I do miss you all, but I’m best one-on-one at the moment, and frequently not even that. I can’t concentrate, can’t think of clever things to say, sometimes can’t even read. My theory is that breastmilk is made of my melted brains.

SLEEP! I slept from midnight until ten AM. Jules probably poked me to feed – she’s still alive – but I remember nothing but hours and hours of sweet deep dreamless sleep! I love my husband and children and the Internets and the poor misguided Republicans, yes and I love you, dear reader, and it’s not just the sleep talking. SLEEP!

So social! On Friday we met Jack, Milo, Ian, Carole and Rowan at Aquatic Park, then proceeded to Vik’s for chaat. On Saturday we had chai with the Ximms at Progressive Grounds, and mandarins with Tina, Frank and Maggie on their way to Glamour & Shag. On Sunday we braved an impressive thunderstorm to visit the O’Sullibrechts in Burlingame, and today after Jules wept for an hour I threw her in the car, drove to Emeryville and joined forces with Salome to run errands. And I skipped three parties because, eh.

Still, it’s Julia I am in love with, her tiny feet and vast galactic eyes. She has adopted Claire’s habit of peering out of the sling like a little forest creature hidden in a hollow tree. I say lemur, Jeremy says sloth. She is a radiant child, especially in his eyes as she never fusses loud enough to wake him up at night. She’s only grumpy today because her nose is runny, and she cheered up as soon as I got her out of the house.

As for me, though, I am so tired that the bones inside my fingers are rattling as I type.

Jules has another of Claire’s habits: the scent of my milk is enough to prevent her getting to sleep; so when she’s with me and overtired but not hungry she will fuss and fuss. As soon as Jeremy slings her and takes her away, she’s in dreamland. Oh the chagrin.

Not many people know this, but I am quite fond of my husband, who turned 35 yesterday. I have a somewhat erratic approach to his birthdays, investing vast effort in celebrations and then forgetting small details, like what day it is. One year I drove him down to Big Sur for a dirty weekend. We arrived at our cabin after lights out, to find the kitchen innocent of a single utensil. We dined on croissants toasted under the broiler, avocado cut with my pocket-knife and champagne drunk from the bottle.

That was the weekend we saw a Californian condor, near McWay Falls.

This year I was slightly preoccupied with Julia, who turned one month old yesterday. It was only a week ago that I sent email to the usual suspects plus a wish-list of people I knew Jeremy would love to see. To my horror, many of the usual suspects already had other plans. Me at 5pm, rending my garments: No one’s going to come!

But practically everyone on the wishlist came. We drank mulled wine at the lovely red-walled Revolution Cafe and had tapas and sangria at Esperpento. I watched the light shining out of Jeremy’s face as he talked and laughed; it was as good as seeing a condor.

Aaron M, that salty dog, told me tales of the sea. “My dad was living on an old motor launch in the Marina. One day this sailboat pulls up next to us, and the mate has left the ship. The guy says to me, Do you want to go to Hawaii? I’m working in a health food store on Castro Street. So I say, Yeah.

“He taught me to sail but he’d only ever sailed in the Bay. We didn’t make it two hundred miles before we had to turn around, he was so seasick. I was stubborn. I’d told everyone I was going to Hawaii, then to Sydney, then who knew where. I said I’ll go where the ocean calls me! I didn’t want to have to see them again, like, five days later. So I’m arguing with the guy, and it was a bit like, Who is the captain here?

“So we turned around. Actually it was on the trip back that I fell in love with the ocean, and who knows how my life would have turned out otherwise? We were in a huge swell, like fifteen foot. I got into a rhythm. You have to steer diagonally across the wave, then when it crests, you turn and steer diagonally the other way. So you’re turning the wheel all the way and then turning it back. And I’m sitting like this, watching the swell come up from behind me, and it’s like I’m playing with the ocean, this wild, amazing force. I’m saying, Play with me. Don’t hurt us. Just play.

“We’d got out to where the sea wasn’t green any more, all messed up with debris from the shore. It was this inky, midnight blue, so beautiful. And we saw the, what do you call it, the bioluminescence. I didn’t know what it was, I thought maybe it was radioactive debris. But we could reach into the water and pull out single strands and shred them, and the bioluminescence fell on the deck and shattered like mercury.

“Yeah, I just got up and went. And ever since, I’ve been in love with the sea. It’s one of the reasons I love Serena; she’s game for anything.”

We hiked Tennessee Valley with Recheng, Knoa and Avi, and when I say hiked, I mean that we meandered pleasantly, chatting about my new baby and her new job, while Knoa and Claire plastered themselves with mud from a puddle. The weather was gorgeous, sunny and cool. We saw a field mouse, two quail, countless hawks and buzzards, a butterfly, a bobcat(!) and six mule deer.

Recheng told us the story of the death of Beni the cat. “Jonathan thought Knoa would want to say goodbye to her cat, so he propped the body up on the front step. When I got home I saw it there and I screamed! Rigor mortis had totally set in; he said it creaked when he moved it. So Knoa came home and patted this dead cat, and I was crying, and the neighbor came past and said ‘Oh, what a lovely day out with the cat.’ And its tail was stuck out at an angle, like this -”

R: Actually, your dog is kinda gay.

Morrisa: My dog is totally gay.

R: I met him in a leather bar with Carson Kressley.

M: He arranges flowers. He writes poetry.

R: I was so envious when he won that Pulitzer.

M: Do they give Pulitzers for poetry?

R: Do they give Pulitzers to dogs?

Jeremy: It was a Pawlitzer.

Throughout the entire conversation, Julia snoozed on her daddy’s lap. She snoozed in the sun in the playground, she snoozed through lunch. She woke every hour or two and cleared her throat – a polite request for milk. This sort of behaviour, day in and day out, has earned her the nickname “Trouble”.

Sometimes she hangs out for a while after eating, looking around with the same huge star-sapphire eyes as her sister, plucking at my shirt with tiny fat fists. Then she falls asleep again, her skin no longer radiation-burn red as it was when she was born, but translucent. She’s peaceful and trusting. I am in love.

It’s an entirely new passion, completely separate from Claire, the way my love for Claire is orthogonal to my marriage. With each kid I seem to have found an unsuspected extra dimension, a new direction that can’t be pointed to. Like Claire, Julia is airbrushed into memories of things that happened before she was born. She has always been here.

Something about Enzo at the Argus Lounge really brings out the drunken hooligan in Rowan and Claire. Last night, just as Jeremy arrived to meet us, Claire tripped and smacked her nose on a table. Fountains of blood and minutes of screaming ensued, until the capillaries clotted and and she and Ro started chasing one another again.

A couple of funny things I forgot to mention about Julia’s birth: Apparently my pelvis is a Tardis, as big inside as the rings of Saturn. Julia, like Claire, was born with a perfectly round C-section head. The OB/GYN who told me I was too skinny for vaginal deliveries is looking pretty silly right about now.

Then, as we were leaving the hospital, Angelina Jolie tried to adopt the baby, but we fought her off.

R: Bryan wishes me luck when the girls are teenagers. I’m thinking military school, chastity belts, firearms.

Q: Ada’s Dads are always talking about guns, but I can’t wait to teach Ada to enslave men’s souls with sex.

R: As if Ada needed any help with enslaving men’s souls.

Gilbert: You have criticized my holy leader. I must destroy you.

R: What? No! That wasn’t criticism. Ada is AWESOME.

Q: Now where the fuck am I going to park?

R: Souls, schmouls. If you could teach Ada to find a parking spot in San Francisco…

Q: I’m interested in the attainable, not the impossible.

So there’s this new concept being urged by disgustingly overprivileged Manhattanitish mothers: the “push present”, an expensive gift from the husband to compensate for the pain of labour.

For both my girls, Jeremy gave me a brand-new dishwasher.

Julia continues to be utterly wonderful. When she’s hungry she doesn’t cry; she just smacks her lips and rubs her hands together. And you know how when Wallace from Wallace & Gromit talks about cheese, he holds up his hands and twiddles his fingers? She does that for my milk. Endearing much?

Today we finally made it out to the new De Young. It was a perfect San Francisco day, all blue and gold and gorgeous. I sat in the sun in the sculpture garden drinking chai, while Jules snoozed in the Moby Wrap and Jeremy and Claire frolicked among the Henry Moores.

Danny: So the other day I walked Ada home from the preschool, and I asked her about Molly and Cecile. I said ‘Are they your teachers?’ And she said, ‘No.’ So I said, ‘Ooo-kay. Are they your friends?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, what are they, then?’ And Ada said, ‘They’re my people!’