Happy Thanksgiving!   Mine was spent in New York with extended family and friends.  My little sister came down from HBS and a few cousins came in from NYC to celebrate at our aunt's place in Long Island.  

This year's big "Thanks" was for "Thomas" born to my cousin just a few weeks earlier.    Now as a general rule, I usually do NOT post other people's pictures on the blog out of respect for their privacy.   And even more directly, I definitely do NOT do it without their permission.   But, in the case of gentle 3-week old Thomas, I think I'll make an exception:

If he tells me some day to take his mug of the 'net, I'll kindly oblige him and commend him for his verbal skills.

With babies we're reminded how so many of the most basic things in life really are right at our disposal.   Little Thomas lives in an angst-free, comfortable 3 hour cycle of "eat, sleep, look around".   As visitors at the dinner table, we had the thrill of seeing an entire day in his life go by before we had even moved on to dessert.   The new parents dutifully reminded us that his cycle wasn't quite so entertaining at 3am. 

Occasionally, the cycle was broken by something we euphemistically referred to as "Thomas's gift back to us."   In stark contrast to when we were passing him around like the village peace pipe, he was now radioactive and only parental hands had the stomach for him.  How someone can deposit what must be a tenth of his bodyweight into a diaper, I have no idea.

And therein lies one of the great aspects of being a 3-week old - your most basic, private bodily functions become not just public spectacle but moments of joy themselves.  Debates between Hanson, Fukuyama, and Pinker about human nature, pride, dignity, physicality, and inviolable rights all fall by the wayside when your entire existence, for a moment, boils down to hanging on for dear life while being burped across your grandmother's lap: