The more things change...

In the second edition (published in 1941) of Florence Brown Sherbon’s The Child: His Origins, Development, and Care, Sherbon approvingly offers an anecdote involving a couple who taught - both of them, husband and wife - at a small college, and who had recently become parents. "From the time that the baby was three weeks old," writes Sherbon, "to the end of the school year, the father took care of the child during the hours when the mother was carrying on her work on the campus."

I drop L. off at the Hopkins greenhouse three days a week, at about 8:25 in the morning, and then Cleo and I motor north, usually stopping for a stroll in Roland Park, of late under falling leaves. Perhaps we wander the aisles of a grocery store. Cleo naps. When she awakes, we walk - she bundled in her Bjorn - along small streams and rivers. Coffee plays a role, at some point, and then there are more naps, and time with blocks, and time yelping, and nuzzling, and tickling. We have been known to check the state of the stock market, briefly, on TV. And one of us usually gets a bath. But back to Sherbon:

"The father said that he wished to do it, he enjoyed it, and he thereby ‘felt that it was really half his baby.’ When the infant was five months old, the mother said proudly that John could and did do everything for the baby quite as well as she, except for the one item of breast feeding."

Well, I wouldn't go that far. L.'s the master of putting Cleo down at night; she's also the one who's tended to Cleo in the quiet middle of the night, putting fears and hunger to flight. And, man, you should see the peals of laughter she can get in playing with Cleo, by pulling a cloth over her tiny face. But why compare, in any case, or why divide the baby into halves? I too wished to do what I've done, and enjoyed it - and if Cleo can fall asleep against my chest while we walk through the city, as on Monday, then enough, enough.

Or enough as far as I'm concerned. And what of others? Well, here's Sherbon, one last time: "It was reported that the whole matter of the arrival and care of the baby was of great interest to the campus and that the young father lost no prestige with faculty or students.”

Well, with no comments extolling or mocking my fatherhood yet surfaced on RateMyProfessor, I can't really speak to the current status of my prestige on campus. But of interest? Everyone's been more generous than I could have imagined. And that includes you, reader. The forms change, then - I'm guessing my 1941 predecessors weren't blogging about their infant. But so much remains, so much remains the same, as I hand Cleo back to L. and get ready to teach my Friday classes.