And while I could tell you about Flora who is enchanting us all with her baby laughter, it's my boy who preoccupies me.
That is a key reason why Dale Jorgenson, an economist at Harvard University, reckons overall productivity growth will average 1.5% in the coming decade, down from 2% in the previous two.Innovation is what preoccupies Mr Obama.
The question of whether Spain will seek a bail-out preoccupies markets and policymakers alike.Our interactive graphic above shows the IMF's latest forecasts (updated in October 2012) for government gross debt as a percentage of GDP through to 2017.
How much longer before these markets reach the bottom?The question preoccupies not just property owners, but above all the banks that have financed them.
Public finances remain squeezed; the "social fracture" still preoccupies France.
What preoccupies Ms Messud most, though, is pre-American life, with its implants of stories inherited and imagined, its baggage of history.The Labasse family are pieds-noirs from Algeria, repatriated to the south of France where father and grandfather Labasse own and run a hotel, alternately a source of pride and of growing domestic tension.
Mr Ahtisaari, a former president of Finland and a Nobel Peace prize winner, is the architect of the plan that led to Kosovo's independence but that also offered its Serbs a large measure of autonomy.Serbian leaders will not admit it publicly, but the real issue that preoccupies them is how to get quietly rid themselves of the Kosovo problem.
But it is the impact of austerity that now preoccupies people.A simple example illustrates the multiplier's importance.
It is the "sweetmeat of a heart / you thought would never grieve" that preoccupies Mr Burnside and it is such longing and grieving that make his poems seem so tantalisingly fragile.
Indeed it is the profligacy and pollution of America's miracle economy that preoccupies Philip Shabecoff, for many years a writer on the environment for the New York Times.
"There isn't a halfway house to register effective dissent without risk of nuclear war," says Peter Montagnon of the Association of British Insurers.That worry still preoccupies some BofA shareholders.
