Baby Steps

When your first child is a baby, there are certain givens for any new parent.

A pacifier hits the floor? Off it goes to be boiled. Bottles need to be heated up or cleaned? Not in the microwave or dishwasher.

Each day, it's off to consult "What To Expect The First Year" to make sure that your kid is crawling or rolling over or supporting himself or whatever it is not at the time that the book says but earlier than that, so that you can eagerly - and casually - report this to the other new parents whose kids are still not there yet.

And playing with the little toys that hang down from the crib? The surest sign that you have created the next Einstein.

For the first birthday party - for which the child is completely unaware of the significance - it's upwards of 40, 50, 60 people - all of whom are there against their will and common sense.

Then there's your second baby.

For all of the above, none of them apply again. For instance, when the pacifier hits the ground, it gets wiped off on your shirt and shoved back into the kid's mouth.

When you have a second baby, especially one that comes more than two or three years after the first, it's easy to forget all of the little things, like how to put in the infant car seat and all that.

These days, when TigerBlog hears of people who have become new parents, he's thrilled for them and wishes them all the best - and then recoils in horror at the thought of having to go through that again.

Of course, one-week-old Mason Sachson isn't just the newborn of Craig Sachson, who works here in the OAC. Mason is also TigerBlog's partner in the destruction of his father's squash game.

TB figures that it'll be a good eight weeks or so before Craig has even passable energy, and during that time, TB intends to take advantage of that fact to punish Craig in squash three or four times a week.

He has no choice, since Craig is way ahead already in the yearly race to see who is going to win the OAC squash championship.

TB grew up playing tennis, and he only played squash once - in college - before he began to play regularly here about 10 years ago, when the Jadwin Gym courts were being redone and lunchtime basketball didn't exist for a few weeks.

His strength in squash is his ability to hit the ball. His weakness is just about everything else.

TB hits squash shots like he learned how to hit tennis shots, and that's not exactly how squash is supposed to be played. His backhand, while very successful, is a full windup as in tennis, which is contrary to how it's supposed to be hit.

TB hasn't played tennis in about 15 years or so, and if he tried now, he'd struggle to put racket on ball, since a tennis racket is huge compared to its squash counterpart.

The Princeton men's tennis team is currently tied for first place in the Ivy League at 3-0, along with Columbia.

If the Tigers are going to win the Ivy title, they're certainly going to earn it.

The next three league matches are Saturday at Dartmouth, Sunday at Harvard and the following Friday home with Columbia. Those three teams happened to be ranked 62nd, 24th and 37th in the country.

Princeton came oh-so-close to winning a year ago, when it finished second to Cornell in a match that could have gone either way.

This year, Columbia has already swept Harvard and Dartmouth, both by scores of 5-2. A year ago, it seemed like every Ivy match was 4-3.

In Princeton's case, that's how its' been this year as well, as that was the score in its wins over Penn, Yale and Brown.

Glenn Michibata is the head coach of the men's tennis team, and he and his program operate a bit far from the limelight around here.

Still, there aren't 25 people who've ever walked into Jadwin Gym who are nicer people than Michibata, who was a great professional player in his own right.

Tennis on the college level plays out through the fall and spring. For Princeton, it's really all about three matches in seven days, beginning Saturday at Dartmouth.