Rick
In case you were wondering, Rick’s arrival didn’t put an immediate crimp in our fragile finances. Quite the contrary: we made money on him.1 MIT and Stanford each had excellent student health plans, to which we were party; under each, we were entitled to significant help with the costs of prenatal and postnatal care, with everything in between.

You can’t say I didn’t warn you: this is only the beginning of a grand plethora of pictures of Rick. Not only was he world-beatingly adorable, and not only were we lawfully silly, doting new parents2, but the excellent Merritt Kimball found among his HP2 supplies a WHOLE CASE of just-barely-expired Polaroid film.3 Which, of course, he said we could have. And Pappy and Mammy had already given us the corresponding camera.

Most of the black-and-white shots on coming pages therefore exist by Merritt’s kindness (and that of HP2) and that of the folks. By and large, we paid for our own 35-mm slide film for the color images you’ll see. Except for the ones (such as these) that Pappy took.
Rick isn’t quite brand-new here (that bedspread resided at Escondido Village, not at the hospital); we took these shots October 1, the day he and Valerie came home.

The Piglet in my lap came from a set of Knickerbocker Winnie-the-Pooh characters that I gave Valerie as I could afford them.4
1We got Erik for free, but we incurred increasing cost at the arrival of each subsequent treasure.
2And he was, of course, our first-born: doesn’t primogeniture govern in the realm of intra-family photo distribution? 3An expensive commodity. As I’ve noted, we weren’t living expensively.
 4You can discern the excellence of this series: it reflected the images from the original Milne books (which we’d read to each other during our courtship), not as (then recently) distorted by Disney. Pooh, I’ve always maintained, was a thoughtful Bear. Not one with Walt’s sclerotic cartoon grin on his plushy face.

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