This week, bottles of breast milk were warmed and served to a mostly appreciative customer. Episodes of Oprah and Curb Your Enthusiasm were watched. So was the State of the Union address. A pot luck dinner reunited Missoula-area alumni of last summer’s Bird Camp.

A potentially momentous discussion began.

More will be revealed.

We should all be so brave, but we aren’t, as became unmistakably clear this week in the wake of Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts special election. The wisdom of my “add-on resolution” to—among other things—try to stop thinking of politics as a team sport was borne out by the pathetic Democratic response to this development. It was clear almost immediately that not only had no Democrat in a position of leadership considered what to do if Coakley lost, but also that the rest of them actually seem to think that there is something inherently good about their remaining in office, even if they are never able to achieve anything important. (We’ll leave aside, for the moment, the obvious lunacy in their apparent belief that, first, voting almost unanimously to approve a health-insurance reform bill, and then letting it die, will somehow help them this fall.)

It’s not that I’m switching teams, because I see no signs that the Republican Party is interested in the effective functioning of government or in anything else save regaining power, whatever the cost for the nation. But the Democrats—or enough of them that the rest don’t matter—seem equally as intent on losing power, at least as long as some of them get to keep their jobs. What is it about national political office that attracts such mediocrities? I wonder if they know how many of us wouldn’t hesitate for a second to trade every last one of them for the passage of the Senate bill. As insufferable as I find the smug self-satisfaction of so many people who call themselves “Independents,” it is difficult imagining ever again doing anything with the words “I am a Democrat” except choking on them.

I suppose there is still a one or two percent chance that the House might still pass the Senate bill, so perhaps I’ll be pleasantly surprised. I’ll certainly be interested to see what Obama does with his timely access to a national, prime-time audience this Wednesday.

On the home front, I began to feel this week as if I were finally understanding Coen a little better. I’d been experiencing real trouble getting the boy to take a bottle during my daily afternoon-long sentence shift as a house-dad, while Amy works a half day. The problem, in case you’ve never considered it, is that with a four-month-old you never know why he’s fussing, and—as you try to respond—you have no good way to do what scientists call controlling for variables. In other words, when he finally does take the bottle, you don’t know whether the temperature, position, timing, or some other unknown factor was finally right, or if he is finally hungry but wasn’t before, or, really, anything else except that you have experienced defeat at the hands of someone who still poops in his pants and doesn’t even have a Facebook account yet.

What happened this week sounds simple but borders on an epiphany for me: I realized that Coen is hungry less often and sleepy more often than I had previously been in the habit of thinking. Sure, when offered the bottle, he’ll try a few sips, but—as in the case of his father—the mere fact that he is eating doesn’t tell you the first thing about whether he’s hungry or not. The whole experience is a good reminder that we see what we expect to see—the proportion of hungry to sleepy has essentially reversed itself from what I got used to early on—but I expect I probably won’t really learn from this experience, instead continuing to make similar mistakes in attempting to understand Coen for at least the next twenty years or so.

Speaking of Coen, we enrolled on his behalf in a so-called “Kiddo Care” course that was organized by a local parenting magazine called Mamalode. (In addition to offering a course in first aid and CPR aimed at parents of young children, Mamalode has the good sense to publish my writing; my essay “Mate Feeding” is currently scheduled to appear in their February issue, although I’m pretty sure the magazine’s content is only available on paper.)

We asked a colleague of Amy’s to babysit for us while we attended the Saturday morning class, but when she stopped by for “training” on Thursday, it quickly became clear that Coen is not really all that sittable right now. We decided to just take him along to the class (after asking the teacher), and it worked out pretty well. There was a twenty-minute interlude when I had to pop him in the stroller and go for a walk along scenic 39th Street (the course, taught by a paramedic, took place in the classroom of the city’s Fire Station Number Three at the bottom of Hillview Way), but overall he was very well-behaved, including when the instructor used him to demonstrate infant CPR.

Kidding!

The week began not with fire but with ice, sheets of it forming on sidewalks and roads that had already been snowed upon and only diffidently cleared. I took Coen on a walk in his stroller on Sunday in hopes of lulling him into a much-needed nap, but the ice created such an uneven surface on nearly every sidewalk that he was kept awake by the lurching and bumping of the stroller’s wheels over the lumps of ice.

Missoula has recently vowed to enforce sidewalk-shoveling ordinances more stringently; if authorities were offering a reward for turning in your neighbors, I could have made a pretty penny. But the real question is whether the city has fined itself for the days’-long impassability of the sidewalk along the bridge near our house.

The freeze, which had been with us for a week or so, finally broke on Monday, and by Wednesday the midday temperatures had been above freezing consistently enough that the ice was starting to retreat. But temperatures were still below freezing overnight, and there was rain on several mornings, and the resulting ice was thin and invisible but no less dangerous for that. Around mid-week, the paper reported that there had been about 20 car crashes one morning because of the freezing rain.

Of course, all of this is only confirming the suspicion of my out-of-state readers that I reside in some sort of Arctic hell for ten months out of the year. They never seem to quite believe me when I explain that this is the warm part of the state, and that the kind of cold I’m describing here is anomalous.

For real cold, you have to go east of the Rockies, out into the flatter parts of Montana. There was a day in early December, during the last true cold snap, when it was in the twenties in Missoula and still about fifty degrees warmer than the northeast corner of the state.

Even Choteau, just on the other side of the Rockies, gets the kind of cold to make last week’s low temperatures in Missoula sound downright tropical by comparison. Our friends Vin and Casey, who used to live two doors down but moved to Choteau for work, suffered a broken water pump and some burst pipes in the last weeks of 2009.

To replace the water pump, they had to drive 50 miles to the nearest Home Depot, and they didn’t realize the broken pipes were broken until the new water pump was up and running. Having just completed the pump repair, Vin was lying under the house in the crawlspace when he began to wonder why he was being soaked with hot water.

That’s country living for you.

On the home front, Coen continued his campaign against drinking from a bottle, leading to long afternoons of struggle and resentment, until all of a sudden he changed his mind. He is large, he contains multitudes, so we’ll call his new openness to the idea a trend only once it has proved to be—but so far, so good.

Amy’s job hunt commenced in earnest this week with her discovery of an ad for a job she would actually like to have. There’s a good chance that’s the last one of those we’ll see, at least as far as Missoula-area jobs are concerned. There’s also a good chance that her application package will be one of 500 or so that the company will receive, and that some blunt filter like “has a microbiology degree” will result in her resume not even being read, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed.

It would be nice if she doesn’t have to compete in the blue/pink-collar market, like for a cashier job at the local version of Whole Foods, since various area plant closings in the last month have dumped about 500 additional job-seekers onto the pavement, or about one percent of the population of Missoula.

Even if our grand Missoula dream comes crashing down, at least our city hasn’t come crashing down on top of us, as happened to the residents of Port-au-Prince this week. In the first day or so after the disaster, I heard someone on the radio quote someone else who had once said something like this:

“War brings out the worst but also the best in people. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have the best without having to have the worst?”

The commentator went on to make the point that such a thing is possible after an event like this earthquake. As I have watched the coverage of one of the worst disasters to befall a nation—relative to population size, relative to ability to respond—in recent memory, it’s occurred to me to wonder if it’s the kind of event that should lead me to change the course of my life, in the way a war might. A Mr. Rogers quote—about how the thing to focus on during catastrophes is all the people who are helping—is making the rounds on Facebook, and I feel the stirrings of that part of me that has always wanted to be one of the helpers.

Of course, that’s the same part of me that led to my joining the Coast Guard, which in turn led to my awkward relationship to Haitians: I used to help deport desperate would-be refugees back to that hellish island. As a result, I can’t help but think that maybe I owe these people more than a ten-dollar text message (though of course every bit helps). What would repay that debt, though, is another and so far unanswerable question.

Hey, did you know that you can subscribe to Margin Notes by email? One email per day, if that, letting you know of any new posts. What’s not to like?

Note on the photos: except for Coen’s, they are from an ice-fishing trip two years ago.

First we stopped at Lolo Pass to walk the snowshoe trail, where I used Neale’s camera to snap the above picture of him on top of the ridge.

He returned the favor.

Then we drove over the pass into Idaho and counted off the 22 or so miles to the Jerry Johnson parking area.

To get to Jerry Johnson from the parking area, you cross a wooden foot bridge and then walk a couple of miles along the banks of the Lochsa River.

The ground was still snow-covered, but it had that drizzled-on, acne-scarred appearance that snow gets after being rained on and then refrozen, and the trail was such a sheet of ice in places that it forced us off into the still-soft snow in the underbrush so as to be able to negotiate the steeper sections without slipping.

The first pool, which lies 30 or so feet down a steep slope from the trail—basically in the river—announced itself with a big cloud of steam hanging over the trail. In a first for me, the pool was empty, and we clambered down to claim it for ourselves.

One advantage of this pool is that it lies so far from the trail. As a result, once it’s occupied, there are psychological barriers that are likely to keep others away. The other two pools are on the trail, so people can stroll right up to you and decide whether you send out a serial-killer or sex-maniac vibe before stripping down (clothing is optional!). If they decide to just keep walking, it won’t be obvious that it’s because they’re having second thoughts about being naked in public near you—they might just be hiking around.

But with the waterfall-fed pool, they will have climbed all the way down from the trail before noticing how weirdly close together your eyes are, or the Mortal Combat knife you have positioned close to hand on a nearby rock.

So despite occasional traffic along the trail, we had the pool to ourselves and spent about two hours soaking, eating a late picnic lunch, and sharing a thermos of hot chocolate before making the drive back to Missoula.

By the time Neale left for North Carolina on Thursday morning, Missoula was in the grip of a terrible cold snap, with overnight temperatures around zero and days of bright sunshine that still only brought us up to fifteen degrees or so. I’m usually not very sensitive to cold, but this was bad enough that I actually wore long underwear and took to letting the car warm up for a while, empty, on the mornings that I headed down to my branch office at Break Espresso to get a little work done.

Bad enough that—as I walked back to the car from the Break, facing into the bitter winds funneling out of Hellgate Canyon—I wondered whether I really do want to stay in Missoula.

This week, Coen continued his slow adjustment back to the routine that was sort of in place before Christmas. To delay the point when she will have to return to work full-time, Amy has been working half days, so I’m home with Coen from a little after noon until around five thirty.

The keystone of this arrangement, of course, is Coen’s taking a bottle from me, which he decided in the week after Christmas he wasn’t going to do anymore, instead screaming and writhing away as if I were trying to pour acid into his mouth.

On Wednesday, as on several preceding days, I had to call Amy home from work early, but on Thursday he finally cooperated and drank down a bottle, in addition to taking three naps.

On Friday, he outdid himself and took two bottles, although he refused to take one of his naps unless I held him upright against my chest and lightly patted his back while he slept. This is no exaggeration: I was reading the New Yorker while he slept, and every time I turned a page, he would start to stir awake until I raced my hand back to his back and returned to the patting.

It’s a see-saw, I guess: bottle-feeding gets easier, but napping gets harder. Adherents to the Babywise brand of baby-raising philosophy would say we erred by not putting Coen on a “schedule” in his first weeks for both eating and sleeping, and letting him cry himself out if he didn’t like it. I regard Babywise with the same skepticism I have for libertarians, Marxists, and other ideologues who claim to know how to make everything perfect if you’ll just follow their program to the letter, but I suppose second-guessing comes with the parenting territory.