The immutable laws of the universe dictate that whenever Salome, Kat and Claire gather together, the conversation will turn to shoes.

Salome: Now remember, Claire; shoes make the outfit.

A fun thing about Herzog is that you can put twice as many baby shoes on a warthog.

The whole reason you have kids is so you can take ’em to the zoo on hot spring days.

SF Zoo is getting better, though it’s still no Taronga. The poor surviving elephants have been sent to a proper home. The lemur enclosure is terrific, and the new African savannah is gorgeous.

We saw giraffes and tigers and lions. A lion lifted its tail and peed through the bars of the cage onto the crowd: it was AWESOME. We saw rhinos and warthogs and a polar bear.

I bought Claire a warthog. Jeremy named him Herzog. Claire is curled up with him in bed, fast asleep.

The blood oranges are in season. Every morning, as I lie in bed ignoring the morning sickness, J squeezes some oranges and brings me a small glass of fresh blood.

I’m only 13 weeks, but there’s no doubt about it: Z/S is kicking.

John Galsworthy is no Edith Wharton.

As I was putting Claire to bed last night, she tried to tell me something VERY important.

“Bub-boo-loo! Bub-boo-loo!”

I just didn’t get it, so this morning while I was having breakfast in bed she came cantering in with the “W” from her wooden puzzle.

“Oh! DOUBLE-YOU!”

You see, I can be taught.

Just now, Jeremy reported: “I sense the hand of Claire on the fridge.”

“Double-yous?”

“Yes, and an upside-down M.”

ROBERT, GAYU and HARRY are crammed onto a doily-bestrewn sofa; RACHEL and JEREMY devour scones with clotted cream. ANGLOPHILIA runs rampant.

Robert: I have an idea for a business! You know how men hate shopping for underwear? And you know Victoria’s Secret? And you know the delivery box services for fruit and vegetables, like Planet Organic?

R: I’m not sure I like where this is going…

Robert: It’s a delivery box for men’s underwear! I call it, ‘Victor’s Secret’!

J: “Shopping is hard! Let’s do math!”

Today in swim class, Claire blew bubbles, kicked and swam underwater from me to John.

Yesterday at UCSF, the fetus currently known as Zoe/Sam waved merrily to the ultrasound. The tech described it as a “cutie patootie”, which I believe is a technical term. Based on the results of that and some bloodwork, our risk of chromosomal abnormalities has been adjusted down from 1 in 300 to 1 in 3,400. I’m very relieved.

I’ve been a bit sick for the last three months. On the way back from the hospital, it occurred to me for the first time that having another kid like Claire might actually be a lot of fun. Quinn says this marks the official beginning of my second trimester.

There may be trouble brewing, though. Claire’s watching Robert Altman’s astoundingly beautiful ballet film, The Company. She loves the dance scenes, and calls them “belly bouncing.”

“Maybe she’ll be a dancer!” says Jeremy cheerily. I danced, very badly, for seven years, and glimpsed the very edge of professional ballet culture. I shudder. Luckily she’s a stocky little biscuit, so unless she magically transforms into a sylph at 5, I think she’s safe…

R: So, how’s your love life?

Steve: Well, I met this guy at Burning Man, but it turned out he was gay.

No sign of Bebe this morning. We searched the house and looked glumly at the twelve-foot trellises around the terrace. We just had a catflap put in the French doors so that Bebe could visit her litter tray al fresco. It looked like our fat, middle-aged feline had scaled the trellises in search of adventure.

Cut to: Rachel and Jeremy knocking on doors all round the block, interrupting at least one boink, begging the neighbours to keep an eye out, but if they see her not to pick her up. “She bites.”

Cut to: Jeremy printing out “Lost cat” flyers, Rachel weeping piteously and going off to put Claire’s laundry away.

Bebe was curled up in Claire’s pants drawer.

I lay on the floor of Claire’s bedroom and laughed till I cried some more.

Now we have a stack of “Lost cat” flyers for the cat who is contentedly sleeping on my bed.

R: Claire, are you my little blicket?

C (agreeably): Little blicket.

R: Are you my girl?

C (sure, whatever): Girl!

R: Are you my darling baby?

C: Darling baby… darling baby? Milo’s the baby.

R: Moebius would be a great name for a strip club.

J: Wha?

R: You know, with math grads shaking their booty.

J: It’s a bit one-sided.

R: It’s got an edge!

J: But the drinks are really small, because they come in Klein bottles.

R: That gives them an extra dimension.

Pause.

R: We really are nerds, huh.

J: Yup.

Later

R: What’s a concrete canoe?

J: Huh?

R: There’s a trailer going into the Marina saying “UC Berkeley Concrete Canoe”.

J: Oh, that. It’s a concrete canoe. It’s a standard project in civil engineering departments. They build ’em and race ’em, to learn the structural properties.

R: What is concrete, anyway?

J: Cement with rocks in it.

R: No, I mean, what is cement? What kind of a thing is it?

J: I dunno. I know you need the right kind of pointy sand, for the crystals to form.

R (dolefully): If I’d got that job on Concrete Weekly I’d know all of this.

J: You sure would.

Later still

R: What we need more of is SCIENCE!

J: Ah yes.

R: Got enough x to make a y, got enough forks to eat a pie…

J: You’re just making up words.

R: …got enough Euros to buy a pound, got enough rocks to build a mound!

J: I never knew you cairned.

New York, New York. We’re at a corporate retreat in the Hudson Valley, doing team-building exercises and arguing over whether the American remake of The Office is any good.

We launched the day the market crashed. Now we’re celebrating our fifth birthday, on April 1st. We survived by a somewhat narrower margin than the skin of our teeth. All hail the company!

Hayao Miyazaki was shocked when a woman told him her kids watch his movies every day. Miyazaki said they should be rationed, to maybe once a year. Does Miyazaki know any toddlers? I think not.

Right now Claire is deeply engaged in a close reading of Porco Rosso, probably his best film. She asks for it daily (“Pig, Pig!”) and gets more out of it each time round (“Pig sleeping. Phone, ring ring! Pig on phone!”) She seems to identify with Porco, much more so than with any of the little girls in the other Studio Ghibli films. I guess being the toughest two-year-old at the Day Street playground is a lot like being a bounty-hunter.

I am diverting myself by planning a trip to Japan for the sole purpose of visiting the Ghibli Museum. I dreamed last night that we all stayed in a ryokan.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, other eight, eight.”

Last night we came back very late from a visit to the Murgisteads. Contrary to her mother’s fondest hopes, Claire had not fallen asleep in the car. Instead she bounced up the stairs, only to be overcome with joy at the sight of her paternal unit.

“Daddy daddy daddy!” she sang. “Claire Mummy Salome Jack Daisy Belinda PIZZA!”

She’s in the back seat of the car. We’re coming home from dinner at the Moores’.

C (sweetly): Mummy?

R (doting): Yes, my heart?

C: NO, MUMMY! MUMMY, NO! NO MUMMY!

R: I see.

C: NO MUMMY!

R: Okay then.

C: NO MUMMY!

J: I believe you’re in the poo.

R: So I hear.

C: NO MUMMY!

Short, expectant pause.

C (sweetly): Mummy?

R: Oh no, you don’t.

Right now her hobbies include: Eating Mummy’s Food Then Spitting It Out Into Mummy’s Hand, Pulling The Tail Of The Incredibly Patient Cat and Jumping Up And Down On Mummy’s Head. Fortunately she’s still the most ridiculously beautiful thing I’ve laid eyes on, like a circus-raised sidekick with her golden hair and full red lips and wide star-sapphire eyes.

I wonder how parents who aren’t crazy in love with the little beasts survive the appalling twos?

Bebe, somewhat less enamoured, has moved into the closet.

It’s a miserable rainy day in San Francisco. I’m tired and a bit poorly. We’re driving to swim class. Claire, in the back seat, starts laughing her head off.

“What?” I growl.

“BLUE!” she sings. “Purple, green, red, yellow, ORANGE!”

She’s right: the rain on peoples’ sprayjackets, the neon lights in shop windows, all these saturated colours against the grey day.

Claire is nuts about her swim teacher, John. She’d swim every day if she could. Most days we wake up to: “John?” “Not today, honey, but soon.” On Fridays, though, she asks: “John?” and I say, “Yep.”

All the way to the JCCSF she sings “John! John! John!”

The whole time we’re in the lockers: “Jo-ohn! Jo-ohn!”

And then we’re in the pool, and she sees him! Oh, the humanity!

“*JOHN!*”

“She likes you,” I observe lamely, as she launches herself into his arms.

Later she gets all afterglowy. Salome called, and I started to tell her about this, Claire’s First Crush, then I said “No, she can tell you herself,” and put Claire on the phone.

“John,” said Claire dreamily. “John.”

J: You’re going to have to move all those wireless antennas.

Jack (proudly): I have one watt!

R: One what?

Jack: One watt of wireless.

R: What?

S: She’s trying to be funny.

Jack: OH! Oh, I can never tell when she’s all dry like that.

Later

R: I walked to Cortland a different way. I went up Eugenia and down Andover.

J: Which one’s Andover?

R: It’s the one that goes up and over. Thank you, I was working on that exact joke.

J: Just never gets old for you, does it?

R: What? What?

“Can you see the letter A?”

(pointing at A) “A! A! A!”

“Awesome! Can you see an I?”

(pointing at eye) “Eye, eye.”

“Well, yes, you got me there. Can you see the letter U?”

(tracing outline of U, grinning maniacally) “Happy! Happy!”

Finding out more and more about the way St Davids protected multiple sexual abusers, the word I keep wanting to use is “maggotty”. You see an animal beside the road, you think it’s still alive but it’s just the maggots heaving that make it seem like it’s breathing.

Then I feel guilty, because maggots leave clean bones, whereas all Vic Cole did with his life was tell lies and make people suffer. He hurt everyone, not just the children he had sex with. I think he’s probably the worst man I’ve ever met, edging out an IRA bomber who at least had the grace to eventually disavow violence.

Still, the maggottiness is real, and it is repulsive. I think it’s what stopped people telling the truth at the time. These godawful things had happened, rapes and incest, but everyone hoped they could just bandage it over and forget about the festering wounds.

Gross as they are, maggots in a wound are a good thing. They pick off the dead meat and let the living flesh heal.