How old am I?

Almost 40. I know this because I can chart my personal decline into my dotage by the difficulty I've had in dealing with the advent of newborns in my family. When Matthew was born, I was 32, and handled all the crazy late-night vigils helping Julie with the baby without much difficulty. Lucas came when I was 37, and it was rather more difficult to go through the same drill. Well, I'll be 40 in February, and though Nora is the most mellow of all my children (so far), I am a mess trying to manage things (we're still in the hospital; Julie had a C-section, so there's more recovery to be done). When I sleep, it's this weird druggy sleep, like I was slipped an Ambien the size of a Baby Ruth bar, coated in a chocolate-flavored horse tranquilizer, around a nougaty black-tar heroin center. I'll be in that sleepchair in the room, and I'll hear my name being called at the end of a long, dark tunnel, and I might think that I'm dead, and it's the Lord calling me to my resurrection on the Last Day ... but no, it's just Julie asking me to get her some more cranberry juice.

My word of advice to you older fathers: if you plan to have any children after age 40, don't neglect to get rich enough to afford help first. Heh.

It will come as no surprise, I hope, that I'm madly in love with this baby girl. With both my girls, actually. I have been blessed beyond all telling. I was holding sleeping Nora in my arms this afternoon, bobbing around the hospital room with my iPod on, watching the rain out the window, listening to Diana Krall's "Live in Paris" album, and thinking how Julie liked the name "Nora Lucia" in part because it could be the name of a stately Jane Austen-like lady, and I liked it because it could be the name of a jazz chanteuse. And I just dig this kid! Turns out our friends John and Ayala Podhoretz had a baby girl, Shiri, on the same day Nora was born. Congratulations to them.

By the way, Julie's passing the hours watching "Grey's Anatomy" on DVDs jammed into my laptop -- I've never seen the show, but now that plinkle-plink theme song will always and forever be stuck in my head as having to do with my daughter's birth. I finished Will Clarke's new novel, which is set at LSU, on the first night, and am now reading a marvelous manuscript for "Small Is Still Beautiful," an upcoming book by Joseph Pearce, about E.F. Schumacher's relevance to our time. But on a trip home today, I picked up my well-worn copy of the Fifth Gospel, and while Julie sleeps, will read selected passages to Nora, to make sure she is properly formatted with theology and geometry. I'm just sayin'.

I'm going to stop typing now, because I'm half-delirious from lack of sleep, and half from being goopily, embarrassingly in love with my wife and kids. Time to go back to the hospital.