We're back in San Francisco, and about an hour ago I was sitting in the living room watching Juniper play with an empty water bottle filled with Wood's high fiber cereal, the only rattle she really likes. Ever since giving birth, Wood has been obsessed with fiber. Our kitchen cupboards are always filled with boxes of Kashi Go Lean and that Trader Joe's High Fiber Crunch cereal that tastes like dirty fingernail clippings. She hoards this cereal. She has to. She eats three or four bowls a day. She even makes her own bran muffins. I have heard her in the other room on the phone with her father discussing in detail their regularity (a subject close to his heart). I was pretending to drink the high fiber cereal from the water bottle and Juniper was cracking up, smiling at me as though she knew I was just being silly. I admit that I suddenly found myself crying right there, I was so filled with love and sadness that she has been growing up so fast.

Here are the things she can do now that she couldn't do before we left a week ago:

• On hardwood floors she crawls backwards smoothly in a sort-of baby moonwalk.
• She can pull herself up into a standing position all by herself. Terrifying.
• She can knock two blocks together in her hands and cackle at the noise (she also bangs on pots and pans with a wooden spoon now).
• She crawls (forward) anywhere she wants, fifteen, twenty feet at a time. She chased my parents' ancient blind dalmation around the house, screaming with glee.
• On the plane this morning she babbled constantly. "Dadadadadadadadadada." We have never heard her talk so much or so enthusiastically. She was the only person on the plane under the age of twenty-five (fucking business travelers with their laptops and their excel spreadsheets and their power point presentations about delivering a better domino's pizza). So her performance did not go over to well with the peanut gallery. Sorry to interrupt your reading of "The Trusted Advisor," dude. I'm sure it's a real page-turner.

The last time we traveled to Michigan and forced her to deal with all kinds of new, strange people and places, we noticed similar developmental "leaps." At the time I told myself I was just noticing new things because I was on vacation and spending time with her 24/7. But this time I'm not so sure. I swear she was either showing off for her grandparents or changes in her environment and schedule forced her to grow and adapt and do new things. Has anyone else experienced this, where taking the baby out of its comfortable environment and familiar routine results in all kinds of cool new changes?

Both Wood and I have read most of the popular theory-based child development books, just to get a sense of what's out there. Almost all of them stress the importance of putting them on a schedule. From the six a.m. bugle call and 6:30 reveille to the seven p.m. rendition of taps, Juniper's life is as scheduled and regular as a grunt's first week at boot camp. We figure this makes it easier on all of us, makes her more comfortable, and better for her long-term development. Weissbluth even suggests it is neglectful parenting to disrupt your child's sleep schedule by allowing the child to sleep anywhere but its crib.

I have always been suspicious of strictness of such suggested scheduling (and Wood's hesitancy to break from our own schedule). I sometimes feel like it's okay for her to fall asleep while we walk around town or stay up a little late to see friends or family or Dolly Parton at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival next month (hint, hint, Wood). I don't think her little world will come crashing down if she doesn't take a bath at night. Wood has been pretty good about letting her deviate from the routine occasionally, but this past week it was almost impossible to keep to it. And I'm wondering if it hasn't done her some good. Some of the books give a little lip service to the acceptability of deviating, but I haven't found any that suggest it may do some good (occasionally).

I know with myself, I love a schedule. I love the comfort of knowing when I come home I can play with Juniper until it's bath time, then maybe take a bath with her, read her a book and rock her to sleep. I love figuring out what to do for dinner with Wood (even if it involves bucketloads of fiber), watching a DVD and falling asleep on the couch until the first bugle call (around midnight). I get really grumpy when I know that schedule is going to be broken, either because I have to leave on business or I have to work late or I have some other obligation.

I have always had a comfortable schedule like that. I get very comfortable with my routines. But when I was nineteen I decided I couldn't continue to live in my home town where I had also chosen to go to college and one day in September nine years ago I got on a plane by myself and seven hours later landed in Dublin with nothing but a suitcase, and I walked west along the quays from the bus station to try to find a place to live. Those were some of my hardest days, not just because I was such a hayseed but because I had started dating Wood a few months earlier and it killed me to leave her like that. But in the end it was tremendously good for me (and us) to have that experience. For adults, it's positively cliche: If you just keep to a schedule, you will never change. You will never grow. Rolling stones, and moss, and all of that.

The same has to be true of babies. Scheduling them is useful, but a schedule shouldn't govern their entire life. Despite what the Baby Whisperer says. Seriously, why should I be taking advice from a woman who writes the way that Daphne from Frasier talks when the empirical evidence proves otherwise? Huh, love? I don't blame Wood for wanting to keep to a schedule. Those boobies are kind of a mandate for routine. I once worked as a cowherd on a small farm in western Ireland and I know how pissed those cows get in the morning if you deviate from their schedule, if you know what I mean.

So we're back from our trip, back to our Frisco schedule. Except I just got back from taking Juniper to Trader Joe's and based on the time zone we've been living in the past week, it was totally past her bedtime. I love carrying that baby around by myself in Trader Joe's. It's the closest I will ever get to feeling like a rock star. We bought Wood five boxes of her fiber cereal. She has been complaining that all we ate in Michigan was unhealthy crap and she barely got 25 grams of fiber a day. She needs to flush her system. I added the boxes to the stockpile in the cupboard, the fiber hoard. If we have an earthquake, and everything is figuratively and literally shaken, our lives torn apart and our schedule all shot-to-hell, at least I know my woman will still be regular.