How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [63]
Besides Lilah’s sleeping, my other main obsession was her eating. Early on, I had taken over one of the nighttime feeding shifts, in an attempt to allow Diane to reclaim a small degree of normality. I used milk that Diane had diligently—if uncomfortably—expressed. I was in charge of milk stockpiling. Diane would hand me a bottle with a bit of milk in the bottom. If I thought we were going to need it soon, I would leave it fresh in the refrigerator, but in times of plenty, I could invest a bit in the future and put it in the freezer. Milksicles, we called them.
Over the first two months, as the milksicle bank began to grow, Lilah and I ventured farther and farther away from Diane. We went on hikes where I carried a tiny cooler full of ice packs and frozen milk, and I would calculate just when I needed to take out a container to thaw it so it would be ready precisely when Lilah would be hungry. I would pay dearly for any mistakes. Milk not ready yet when Lilah was hungry? Lilah: Waaaaaaaaaa. Brought too little, and she was still hungry? Lilah: Waaaaaaaa. Brought too much, and some thawed and went to waste? Me: Waaaaaaaa.
I invented—in my head—myriads of new devices specifically designed to help parents acquire, manage, and efficiently use their frozen milk supplies. One day I even started to create a supply database to record the comings and goings from the refrigerator and the freezer. Diane made me stop. “You’re nuts,” she said. “Don’t you have better things to do?” I did. I really did. But I kept charting, graphing, and posting, nonetheless.
My last post was on March 4, 2006—day 240 of Lilah’s life. By March I finally was back to work full-time and Lilah was spending her days with a nanny and another girl exactly her age, who to this day remains her inseparable best friend. I was just coming back from a trip to the East Coast, where I had spoken about planets, new and old. But all I could think of at the time was what Lilah might be doing:
I’ve missed Lilah for the past few days. I’m on my way home from one of the longest trips since her birth. What’s she going to be like when I get home? Actually standing? Able to wave bye-bye (we’re working on that one now)? Finally relaxing now that mom and dad are more relaxed? Is that first bad case of diaper rash all resolved (we don’t really need to talk about that, now, do we?). Can’t wait. Can’t wait. Can’t wait.
And then that’s all. I’m sure I didn’t intend to stop forever that day. I’m sure I just got busy and skipped one day. Then two. Then a week. And then it was over. I’m sad now because as the memories have faded I can no longer go back and relive all of those moments of that time of Lilah’s life. If I could, I would. I would do it all over.
Chapter Nine
THE TENTH PLANET
On the morning of the twentieth day of Lilah’s life, only a few days after dumping kitty litter into the washing machine, I received a strange e-mail. A NASA official in Washington, D.C., wanted to know about Santa, which he called K40506A, the name my computer program had automatically assigned it on the day of discovery (K for Kuiper belt, 40506 for 2004, May 6, and A for the first one found that day). A colleague across the country was interested in studying K40506A, and the NASA official wanted to know when we were going to publicly announce the discovery.
My sleepy brain tried to make the connection: How would someone at NASA know about Santa, and, stranger, how did he know to call it K40506A? Had I told someone about it in the past few weeks? I couldn’t remember mentioning it to anyone. Baffled, I did a quick search through my e-mails since Lilah’s birth. Nothing but back-and-forth baby news and pictures. But the e-mail did jar my brain enough to remember that sometime in late July (and wasn’t it now late July?) an online announcement would be made of the titles and subjects of hundreds of talks that would