As a childless adult, I often mourned the tortoise-and-hare dynamic of weekdays versus weekends. You know what I mean -- your days off blast by before you even know what's passing you, but the work week grudgingly plods past, muttering something about how slow and steady makes Jack a dull boy and causes him to mix his entertainment references.

Well, now that I have a child, I've found that weekends seem to last longer. It's not just a fleet-footed haze of beers and TV and beers and theme parks and more beers anymore. Now there are diapers to change and songs to sing and dances to dance and then when Avery eventually falls back to sleep more laundry than anything so tiny should be logically able to generate. I'm working weekends and evenings now, and even though it's on a project I enjoy it does make for a longer day.

Inversely (or perhaps perversely), however, my work days last even longer yet, because I'm not taking care of the baby. Instead, I'm stuck at a desk in some office two miles away, with what suddenly feels like way too little work for this unjustly extended business period. I have to settle for my desktop wallpaper if I want a glimpse of my punkinhead, until this dragged-out day finally staggers to the finish line of 5:00 and I can jackrabbit back home to her.

We knew we'd probably only be sleeping for three or four hours a night, but none of you parents bothered to mention that when Avery finally joined us, the Moya family would be sucked into some bizarre time warp that stretched the day from 24 hours to approximately 40.