Sleeping through

The Department of Health says that by six months 50% of babies are sleeping through the night. Then they add that 40% of children wake once or twice a night between the ages of two and three.

So, either you fall into the lucky half at six months or you wait til your child is four?

Pearl has yet to make it through the night without waking. We are currently in the midst of an intensive program of working on her sleep. But not sure with what success. A few nights with only two resettlings and some marathon sessions of eight resettlings.

Areopagitica

I am currently doing a massive decluttering. I have decided that I can't afford a new house; but I can have less stuff in the house.

I have removed/given to charity/passed on about three shelves of books. I found my collection of Milton's prose workings which I had not read since university.

I toyed with getting rid of it but then found the article on freedom of the press: 'For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.'

Also, there's the amusing essay on why divorce should be legal. Of course, this was a mainstream position for Protestants at the time. Having redefined marriage to include companionship, they logically thought marriage should end when the companionship ended.

It's just particularly amusing in Milton's case because he made a catastrophically bad marriage. When a hyper-literate, mid-40s, pro-Cromwell Protestant marries an illiterate, teenaged Catholic, you know it can't end well.