I think the baby is going through a growth spurt.

I'm afraid, though, that he is not going through a growth spurt. Because if this is going to be how he normally feeds... well, I'll be spending most of my days and nights with a baby hanging off of me from tender points. And although I do like feeding him, I am starting to feel just a wee bit like a moo cow.

Jeremiah seems to have a nearly limitless capacity for drinking milk. The only hope is to feed him enough that he finally falls satiated into a milk-drugged sleep. Even that doesn't always work, though. Sometimes his eyes close and he seems to be fully asleep... except that his cheeks are still working away like a little chipmunk, and he's clamped on to that nipple for dear life.

This afternoon, the tot latched on to me and started drinking. It went on for ages. I kept thinking surely he was done, but then he'd start up again. After half an hour, he appeared to be completely asleep but was nursing on autopilot. I figured he'd probably had enough and I could unclamp him and put him in the basket to sleep for a while.

"Okay little guy, you're shut off," I told him, and attempted to gently pull my nipple out of his mouth.

He wouldn't let go. Although he seemed to be in deep sleep, he started suckling like mad.

I let him drink for a while until his motions slowed down, then tried again. Again my efforts just got him suckling again. It tickled, and it was also very funny, and I started laughing. The laughter made Tot's head bounce all over the place, his eyes still closed, just suckling that much harder to hold on tight through the breastquake.

"Help," I said, "I'm glued to The Vampire Le Tot."

That got a giggle from Pär, sitting in my office-née-closet at the computer. I tried again to gently remove the nipple from the baby's mouth, without success.

"Pär, I need a very small crowbar."

Without turning away from the computer screen, he waved his hand airily. "Feh, your women's work does not concern me."

"Pär, I am going to find a very small crowbar and then hit you over the head with it."

He came over and tried to insert his pinky finger into the corner of Tot's mouth, a trick we'd read about in some book to help pull a baby off the nipple. He couldn't get his finger in there; the baby was clamped on too tightly. I started laughing again, making Jeremiah bounce around. This whole time, he was heavily slumbering away, yet somehow maintaining his death-grip on my breast.

"Break the suction!" I cried. "Break the suction!"

Finally we pried the baby off of me. Pär carried him out to the front room while I drank two glasses of water that my dehydrated husk of a body was craving.

A few minutes later, Jeremiah woke up yelling to be fed.

Yep, I sure hope he's going through a growth spurt.

Then again, at this point his whole life is a growth spurt. I guess I'd just better make sure the remote control is within arm's reach of the rocking chair, and plan on sitting there watching a lot of bad TV for a while.

Or I could watch a lot of bad videos. Note my graceful segueway! We're going to talk about videos now.

A funny thing happens to Pär sometimes when he goes out to rent videos. Our local store has a three-for-the-price-of-two deal, so we often pick up three vids at a time. This allows us to bring home a variety that suits our changing movie-watching needs and moods for the following two evenings. Even if one of them is a disappointment, we usually end up with one or two good films to fall back on.

But if Pär goes in without specific instructions on what to rent, some wild, random corner of his brain takes over and he will come home with the most unlikely movies. He'll pick up those dusty videos that sit on the shelves for years without being touched, because nobody's ever heard of them or, often with good reason, nobody wants to see them.

This quirk of his has occasionally resulted in us discovering some really cool obscure films. But more often, it results in us returning a couple of crappy videos to the store unwatched.

About three weeks ago, I was as pregnant as could be. Boo was over that evening, and we sent Pär off to the video shop to pick up a movie. Something light, was my suggestion. Something funny, maybe. A moderately new comedy, perhaps.

Pär returned looking stunned. "I... I don't know what happened," he said. "My brain shut down. I got onto this spy kick."

He had rented Smiley's People, which would have been great to watch except that it was five hours long and we all wanted to be asleep in two hours' time. So that was out. Then he had rented some 80's spy thriller with Michael Caine, which I vetoed because I dislike Michael Caine. He had also rented The President's Analyst, which is a very funny movie we discovered years ago on one of Pär's more successful ventures into the unknown. But we've seen that twice already, and didn't know if Boo would like it, and she wasn't really in the mood for it anyway. And then there was Gorky Park. I'd never seen Gorky Park but Pär had, so he knew that it was going to keep flashing shots of decapitated bodies (occasionally crawling with maggots which, I kid you not, is an important part of the plot). But all I knew was that it starred William Hurt and I like William Hurt. So there I was, as pregnant as could be, all unwittingly choosing to look at bloody decapitated maggoty flesh.

I am not normally squeamish about ick in movies, but somehow, being massively pregnant made me more susceptible to it. I think because I felt so vulnerable, with my stomach all stretched out unprotected in front of me with its precious cargo inside. Also, it makes a person more cautious, the awareness that if a scary situation comes to fight or flight, you're not going to be too hot at either option. It makes you want to avoid feeling like you're in a scary situation, even when you know it's not real. The thrill is not enjoyable when you feel that exposed.

In short: the ick factor finally drove me away and I never saw the end of Gorky Park. What a depressing movie, though. I sat through over an hour of it, and the only thing I remember about the movie now is that it filled me with a strong resolve to never live in the Soviet Union in the 1980's.

Boo was here again the other night and we sent Pär out to rent a movie. He came home hanging his head and looking guilty.

"Oh no," I said, as soon as I saw him. "You did it again, didn't you."

He nodded. "I rented crap! I don't know what happened!"

"What did you get."

"Okay, as a fallback I got a Steve Martin movie I used to watch over and over, and I haven't seen it in years --"

"Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. I could see that again, I suppose. If I had to."

"Yes! Okay. And then I got this Kenneth Branagh thing called, uh something about Love. I don't know why. It was in the New Releases section."

[Note: the movie was Love's Labour's Lost, and we watched it the next night. Branagh takes the Shakespeare play and sets it in the 1930's as a musical, with songs by Cole Porter and so forth. It's weakened by the fact that almost nobody in the cast can actually sing or dance worth a damn, but somehow we really liked it anyway. There were surreal Mel Brooksian touches throughout, the whole thing looked beautiful, and we got to see a Shakespeare play (sort of) that neither of us had seen or read before. It was probably the initial surprise of its bizarreness and the sheer pleasure of its not being godawful that pleased us so, but still, we liked it. If you ever find yourself so tired that you can't think anymore but you want to see something light and sweet and strange and musical and lovely, you could do worse than this film.]

"The Branagh thing might bear investigation. What's the third movie?"

Pär's eyes darted around shiftily.

"What's the third movie!" I shouted, to startle him into a confession.

"I rented the worst movie ever made," he said, with an odd undertone of pride.

I thought for a moment. "Oh, tell me you did not rent Battlefield Earth."

"Yes!" he said, punching the video upwards in a victorious motion and rattling the box around above his head. "Battlefield Earth!"

"You're giving money to the Scientologists!"

"No I'm not! Well... yes. But it's going to be great!"

"It's going to blow beyond all imagining."

"But in a good way!"

After some debate, it became obvious that Pär was really eager to see this film, and Boo (who doesn't pay much attention to sci-fi movies, and therefore was unaware of this film's reputation) was amenable, so we started it up. The question on all our minds was: Would the film be so bad that we would have fun mocking it, or would it be so very very very bad that even the fun of mocking it wouldn't make it bearable?

That question was quickly settled for me and Boo within a few minutes of viewing. But Pär hung in there, pretending to enjoy it. At least I think he was pretending. About ten minutes in, he stood up to bring Jeremiah to the bathroom to change his diaper.

"Don't pause the video," he said. "Just tell me what happened when I get back."

He returned two minutes later to find the television turned off. "So what happened?"

"We reached our limit," I said. "We couldn't stand to watch it anymore."

"I think for me," said Boo, "that moment came when Travolta threw back his head and evilly laughed, 'HA ha HA HA HAAAH! MuaAH HA HA HA HA!'"

Pär protested a little, but faintly. The next day, while I was out of the apartment, he rewound the bit he'd missed and watched more Battlefield Earth. When I came home, he told me about it.

"I liked the part where Travolta said 'HA ha HA HA HAAAH! MuaAH HA HA HA HA!'"

"Of course you did," I said. I was determined that he wouldn't get a rise out of me. It would only encourage him to rent the damn thing again.

Pär threw his head back and cackled. "HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!"

"Yes, yes, very evil," I said.

"I thought it showed some interesting character development," he said off-handedly, his voice casual and matter-of-fact.

My composure broke. "All right, now you're pushing it too far!"

He gazed downward to hide his grin.

This afternoon he came in when I was sitting in the rocking chair, having finally gotten Jeremiah to sleep in my lap. "I can take him into the other room if you want a break," Pär said. I gratefully handed the baby over to him.

"Good. I'm going to go finish writing my journal entrée."

"What's today's entrée about?"

"Jen just wrote a great entry about how her boyfriend wanted to watch Battlefield Earth," I said. "So I figured I'd mention our own recent experience with that."

His eyes lit up. "We still have it," he breathed reverently. "The video is out in the car."

"Yeah, because you didn't return it yet."

"Shut up!"

"How late is it? Two days now?"

"Or three," he mumbled quickly. "Hey, can I get you something to drink?"

"Three days?"

"I've been busy. How about some mango juice?"

"The video store is only one block away! We're still paying money for Battlefield Earth!"

"I'll get you some mango juice, then." He ducked out of the room.

I know he thinks that if he can just keep the video hanging around long enough, eventually I'll have to watch it to justify paying to rent it for several days. But it's not so. The more Battlefield Earth I see, the less I am willing to pay. At this point I would almost rather buy the video and destroy it, for the sake of keeping it out of the store and sparing my local community the agony of ever renting it.

PS. Jen. I hear your pain, sister. And I'll be honest: I actually kinda. Sorta. A little, teeny tiny little bit. Wanted to see it too.

There is no shame in this. We didn't know. We didn't know the full horror of how unspeakably bad it would be! How could we have known?

But just maybe, what we have written here will save others from making our mistake. And if we can save even one hapless reader from giving their money to the Scientologists for the privilege of watching this -- I'm running out of words here -- this unbelievable heap of shit... then our sacrifice was not all in vain.

Oh, but Jen... Chevy Chase is not back. He was never here, Jen. I know we all thought Fletch was funny back in 1985. We were wrong.