This week’s highlights

Tomorrow is the supposed, guestimated, calculated-by-the-percentages, day you should have your baby. It’s the day we’ve been planning for and waiting on… but whether that means we’ll see any action from the little guy tomorrow or not, nobody knows. Here are some highlights from the past week:

1. Last weekend we decided we needed to get out of the house so that we could take our minds off the sitting around and waiting. I think there was a small part of us that thought the “watched pot never boils” axiom might just hold true for pregnancy… though I’m not sure what the literal translation would be (a watched belly never pops?). This thinking was probably influenced by Hollywood, where the rule is that as soon as you act like you’re not going to have a baby and drive an hour away from the hospital… that’s when you’ll go into labor. Regardless of what we thought, it obviously had no effect… but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have a nice day out. We went to a place I like to call ‘Little America’… I call it this because there’s a TGI Fridays with unlimited drink refills, free parking everywhere, a Gap outlet, and a Best Buy. This specific combination of things that are thoroughly un-British is refreshing.

We ate ribs and shrimp, bought some shirts on sale at the Gap, and went to the mall where we discovered another little bit of American culture: the mix-it-up-on-a-cold stone/marble slab ice cream store. I had to try it… and, as I suspected, it was a bust. The guy totally didn’t know what he was doing. I asked for a relatively simple combination (so I thought): vanilla ice cream with Oreo mixed in. After ten minutes of waiting on the guy to carefully scoop out the ice cream, flatten the scoop into a perfectly round disc on the marble slab, and carefully place a single Oreo cookie precisely in the center of the ice cream circle, we both just start laughing. The caution exercised by this very British guy was just too typical not to be funny. “Be careful, man! You don’t want to be reckless, someone could get hurt!” <sigh> You just have to go for it. Let it get sloppy. That’s why it’s fun!

2. I learned how to use a Moby wrap! I have to be honest, I was not optimistic about rolling out a piece of fabric that could run the length of my house, and then trying to figure out how to tie my baby to my chest with it. Nonetheless, I gave it a shot.

There was also another aspect of the whole thing that I wasn’t too thrilled about… namely, the “baby wrap vibe” is decidedly feminine. I think that the companies that make these things have picked up on that, which means that they eagerly and blatantly want to convince you that CARRYING YOUR BABY IN A WRAP IS MANLY.

 

 

Exhibit A:

Can you get more manly than this? It’s the kind of outfit that looks like it was purchased entirely at Tractor Supply or Orscheln’s. Camo hunting cap, tight(!) wrangler jeans, a sporty wristwatch, work boots, and white t-shirt that says, “My other shirts clash with my rifle.” The moustache, of course, tells a story all on it’s own: “Anyone who thinks that carrying your baby in a wrap isn’t manly, meet Butch. He’s a former marine who loves to go hunting Bears with his newborn son. Also, as an added bonus, the fabric folds across the back to form a perfect sheath handy for carrying any large hunting knife, finally solving that age-old problem: what do I do with my machete when I’m carrying my rifle and my compound bow?”

In any case, I learned how to use it, but didn’t feel any more manly… maybe I was using it wrong? Or maybe I need the moustache to complete the look?

Well, this post is long enough for now… I’ll post some pictures tomorrow.