Just Like Starting Over

So, tomorrow my wife and I bring home our new daughter (baby #3) from the hospital; she was born Monday afternoon. I’d post more but my wife is insistent that we put as little information about the kids on the internet as possible. Let’s just say the little lady, like her sister, exercised her full female prerogatives and arrived ten days late.
Hence, of course, the blogging interruption, which will continue; I’ve actually got a fair amount of stuff stored up from my review of how Established Win Shares Levels (explanation here for new readers) panned out in 2005, and am frantically at work on the 2006 EWSLs, which I use as the framework for my preseason previews. I’ll be at home this week and next, so even with the chaos of a new baby I expect to make some progress on that front, but there’s no predicting how far I’ll get or how much of it will make it into completed posts any time soon. The collateral consequence of this is that the political content around here should be pretty minimal through Opening Day.
Having a third baby six years after the last one is, as I’ve said before, like coming out of retirement. Every time I feel too old for this, I try to remind myself that lots of people our age (34) are just getting started; we’re really just old compared to when we had the first two (I was 25 when my son was born).
Looking at all the baby stuff they sell these days (car seats, infant toys, etc.) and how far it’s all advanced from where our first daughter was born, I feel like we had our kids in another century. In fact, we did have our first two in another century, in what seems like another world. When we last brought a baby home from the hospital in the summer of 1999, I was still working in the World Trade Center; Bill Clinton was the president, and “the war” meant Kosovo. John McCain was still a relatively obscure Senator, Howard Dean an extremely obscure governor. The Mets’ pitching rotation included Orel Hershiser and Masato Yoshii; the major league home run leader was Mark McGwire. Wade Boggs was still playing. Patrick Ewing and the Knicks were the defending Eastern Conference champs. “The Sopranos” was coming off its first season on TV.
I hadn’t started wrting on the web then; nobody had heard of “blogs.” Bill Simmons was still an obscure web writer, Glenn Reynolds a law professor known only in his field, Duncan Black and John Hinderaker were just working lawyers, and Aaron Gleeman and Matt Yglesias were still in high school. 1999 was the year I bought my first Baseball Prospectus. (Heck, when my son was born in the summer of 1997 I didn’t even have email at work). In 1999, my mom was still with us.
The new arrival shares the name of my grandmother, who was born in 1900 as a subject of Queen Victoria. Life goes on . . . and I should go get some sleep, while the house is still quiet.