Well my appointments are now on Tuesdays instead of Thursdays so this was a very short week. But the short week came with big news. I got one of my regular nurses (I’ve not been seeing my regular nurses because they are tied to the doctor so since my doctor has been out, I’ve not seen them in a while) and she was appalled that I was this far along and didn’t have good confirmation of the gender. She hustled me to an ultrasound room and the tech managed to get a good shot.

It is indeed a girl as we suspected. So it is no longer Baby TBA but a girl baby with an actual girl name. Since I haven’t asked Stephen if we can divulge that to the population at large, the name will have to be a separate post. (I might even let him make it.) You’ve waited this long, you can wait a bit longer.

All is well with the both of us. Good blood pressure, heartbeat, etc. I am starting to feel like a house but usually that’s only at night after I’ve been up all day long doing stuff. I want to sleep all the time which now that I think about, my time would be better spent napping than typing on the computer so g’night to you all.

As you might have gathered, Eli and I survived the weekend unscathed. We didn’t do what I threatened Misty with, namely, sitting around with me in my boxers and Eli in his diaper, grunting at sports on TV. Instead we did pansy things like bake brownies and go to the library and stomp around in rain puddles.

A few years before Eli was born, one of Misty’s acquaintances said something like, “I could never leave my kids with their dad. He’s hopeless. He’d let them fall down the stairs and kill themselves.” We swore that wasn’t going to be the case with us, if for no other reason than we didn’t have stairs in our house. But I was going to be able to take care of Eli by myself.

Then Eli came and we discovered how hard that was. Misty was his primary care-giver for reasons of biology and circumstance. It took time before she felt comfortable leaving him with me, and I felt helpless because I didn’t know all of his signals. Why is he crying? Is he hungry? Is he mad? ARE THERE EVIL SPIRITS IN HIM? And Misty’s inclination was to take him from me and deal with him, because she understood him and could fix what was wrong quickly.

(Before you’re a parent, you wonder about things like, “Why can’t parents just wash their hands so they don’t catch colds from their kids?” and “How hard can it be to stay friends with people after you have a kid — just because you’re a parent doesn’t mean your life’s over!” Afterwards, you think, “I was an idiot.”)

I eventually became better at keeping Eli, enough that Misty was willing to leave him with me for extended periods of time. And by this time I knew what to do: have a whole lot of activities lined up so you can keep your kid from becoming bored and can run him to exhaustion. It worked like a charm!

I did have one moment of panic. I was on the phone with Andrew and Joy, who had called to make sure I hadn’t burned down the house. Eli was measuring things with a small six-inch ruler. “The door is seventy inches long. This lamp is seventy inches long. The carpet is seventy inches long.” He climbed up on the guest bed, said, “Watch this!” and proceeded to fall back onto the bed. His head missed the headboard by less than an inch.

Hey, dad, remember when you took me to your office and I got acquainted with your typewriter? Now I truly know how you felt.

Well, I’ve returned and had a fine trip. LanaBob! visited another friend in Birmingham and then drove up on Friday. We left to go to Nashville on Saturday morning. It was a total gabfest from the moment we got in the car here until the moment we got out of the car here.

LanaBob! was unfortunately subjected to a great number of super gross and not-so-gross baby related topics that she suffered through gracefully. Missy (mother of three, yes, three girls!) brought Terry and me four boxes of girly baby clothes and they are beautiful. Some of them are so cute, I may put my kid in them even if it’s a boy.

Terry’s new house is gorgeous and frankly big enough to double as a bed and breakfast.

The only downer of the whole weekend was that we were going to go to The Melting Pot on Saturday night but we didn’t call for reservations soon enough to get in. Dinner was still good but it wasn’t The Melting Pot. We’ll know better next time.

I think we are going to try very hard to all get together again before another seven years elapse.

Missy, Me, LanaBob! & Terry

I returned to a clean house AND the boys had managed to finish the shelves in the office and put the books up from under the bed. I’ll post photos of that soon. They also had a great time and seemed happy to see me when I returned.

As Misty mentioned earlier in the week, she is off on a weekend trip, leaving me here with Eli.

By myself.

With Eli.

I’m sure it will go okay, but I’ve been here with him for less than an hour and I’m already out of things to do. We made brownies and played on the bed and played with money and tried some coloring and thought about reading but Eli wasn’t interested. Right now he’s playing in the living room by himself, but that won’t last. It won’t. I know it won’t.

Oh no, here he comes! Here he

Nearly a decade ago I read The Transparent Society, David Brin’s take on how to handle encroachments on our privacy. At one point in the book, he mentioned off-hand that the UK was blanketed with CCTV cameras. Goodness, I thought. That’s a lot of TV cameras watching citizens. Then I forgot that little factoid.

That helps explain my surprise to find out that there are 32 cameras within 200 yards of George Orwell’s home.

But having one camera for every 14 people in the country isn’t enough. More progress is needed. In fact, what’s needed is CCTV cameras that talk back. Now police can scold litterers, warn people who are getting into fights, and more.

Home Secretary John Reid told BBC News there would be some people, “in the minority who will be more concerned about what they claim are civil liberties intrusions”.

How silly of people to be concerned. After all, what could go wrong?

Marie Brewster, 26, a young mother, appeared on TV news reports after a camera operator mistakenly thought she had dropped litter and boomed out a reprimand from the control centre in Middlesbrough.

In some ways, I prefer the talking cameras. They make their presence felt in ways quiet, unobtrusive cameras don’t. They remind people that they are being watched. And if the monitors are going to make mistakes, better they make them publically than quietly.

The UK implemented the Data Protection Act to deal with privacy concerns, and has many CCTV cameras registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office. The US has no such provisions. Ignoring this issue isn’t going to make it better. I spent part of this week looking at the latest in automatic license plate technology (verdict: easily usable in real time) and facial recognition (verdict: not yet, and probably not for several more years, but getting frighteningly better every year). I’d much prefer we have an expanded Freedom of Information Act and others to handle these technologies, since it will take a while for the inevitable ACLU cases to produce applicable case law.

Chemical Brothers: Star Guitar (2002)

Michael Gondry’s video for Daft Punk’s Around the World, in hindsight, looks like a warm-up for this video. It’ll take you a moment to figure out what’s going on. I’d be curious to know at what point you twig to what is the most clever use of this particular music video cliché I’ve seen.

Radiohead: Street Spirit (Fade Out) (1996)

There’s something deeply disturbing about how director Jonathan Glazer fiddles with the speed of events. Some of the video is silly, but the overall effect is one of melancholia. Brr.

I went to the doctor yesterday and all is well. My BP was good. The baby’s heartbeat was good. I’ve not gained any more weight, which she seemed pleased by. My regular OB comes back week after next and I am really looking forward to seeing her. It seems strange to miss your doctor but when you see someone as often as you see your OB in the last part of pregnancy, it starts to matter.

I’m having more and more trouble getting comfortable enough to sleep, so I’m not sleeping as well as I’d like to. I would really like to make it past the first weekend in May because I want to go see the new Spiderman movie, but my desire to be more comfortable may start to outweigh that pretty soon.

The doctor said I was good to go to Nashville this weekend so I can have a last hoorah with my three best girlfriends. (We get so crazy! We stay up late and talk about our seven kids and sometimes, our college days.) So I won’t be typing here much but I might just have some photos when I get back.

I started this project on January 4 and finished this evening. I’m very glad to have it done before the baby gets here. Now to get it framed.

Also, here’s a photo of what the pattern looks like once I’ve finished with it.

See why I make copies?

This year before Easter we decided to have a Christian Passover Seder. We had a table full of friends and explored the meanings of all the symbols, ate dinner, and drank kosher wine (grape juice for the preggers girls at the table). It was really interesting to read the material and watch how all our non-Jewish friends dealt with the structure of the traditions and with one another (we had an assortment of friends from several different circles). I’m glad we did it and would like to do it again next year so that we might shed the feeling of playing dress-up and actually start feeling as if we were practicing something meaningful. It was a really good evening.

But that’s not what this post is about.

I roasted four chickens for the dinner. Which was about two chickens too many. I still have a massive container of chicken. So I implore you, please help me think of something to make whereby I can finish off the meal that keeps on giving.

So far I have made:

• chicken quesadillas
• chicken salad
• chicken pesto pasta
• plain chicken (too many times to count)
• white pizza (with chicken! no red sauce)

I have a thing about bags. Some of you know this already. I try to keep it under control but it’s hard really. They call to me and ask me to take them home. I have a dollar limit that I don’t like to exceed at any given purchase and I try to only buy something about once a quarter. But a new baby means a new diaper bag and I found the exact one that I wanted today on SALE! The best part, it’s a sling so it’s totally rocker-dad friendly. Stephen won’t be embarrassed to have it on. Here’s a photo:

The other very cool thing that I bought today was a hotsling. My sister-in-law turned me on to them. I was very interested in them as they are fit to you, as opposed to a system of pulleys and ratchets that annoy you into pitching it across the room. I had one of those with Eli and never used it because by the time I got him in and adjusted correctly, I needed to take him out for whatever reason.

I was going to buy one and then got sidetracked and then they put the one I wanted on sale and then I got sidetracked. So I thought I’d go to the local store that carries them to check them out and of course, they didn’t have my size. (That didn’t stop the saleslady from trying to sell me one two sizes too small though.)

So when I got home I did some internet browsing and SCORE! I got the one I wanted at another online baby retailer for the sale price AND free shipping. Here’s a picture of it:

Can’t wait to try and sport the sling, the baby, and the sling backpack at the same time. I ought to look like a Sherpa when I have all that going on…