We have a humidifier in our bedroom that makes water sounds. Combine that with a tangled pair of long johns, free floating anxiety about the upcoming birth, and a baby kicking me in the back through my wife's belly and it all combines into one monster of a bad dream. The short version is that I'm in a straight jacket mid-ocean trying to stay afloat and get my wife to the hospital on time.

--

We've largely stopped being worrying about "when" and are instead just focusing on staying ready. In the meantime we've made the mental shift from thinking about a Thanksgiving baby to a December one. I'm not sure why this makes a difference but it does. Our current worry is that our daughter will crowd her aunt Becky's birthday. The Yuns take birthdays seriously and we want to give Becks plenty of space to revel and be appreciated.

But these are idle thoughts. Most of all we just want this girl to be healthy and loved. We, like all parents, have a million other hopes and fears... that she will avoid some of the mistakes we have made, that she won't be as difficult as we were, that she will see us as friends... ultimately that she will be better than us. But of course she must fail to learn and must sometimes hate us in order to grow. We know all this.

I've been computerizing our family tree of late. We are an unlikely mix of Gutierrez' and Yuns, Mudges' and Paeks, Perez', and Townes. A hundred years ago our ancestors lived on 3 continents and probably would have killed each other on site. I'm sure this child will have a bit of the best and worst of us all.

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Jenn had a pre-labor contractions, but nothing major... and these pre-labor contractions can last for days...

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I've discovered our ice cream maker can double as a poor man's slurpee machine. Yum.

Nothing to report on the baby front. Watched pots and all... So we try to go about our days.

We read the paper over breakfast. (Jenn is fascinated and repelled by Vladimir Putin, always taking special interest in news of his friends or foes. Sometimes, between spoonfuls of cereal, I will hear my wife chuckling ruefully, "Khodorkovsky, my friend, bad move. Bad move." or "Watch your back Yushchenko, the next time the poison will take."

We plan on naming a dog Putin someday.)

We putter about and run errands.

I do work.

And act like everything is totally normal.

I'm done with making predictions and will let the biology take it's own mysterious course without prognosticating and getting everyone all riled up. Jenn is enjoying a nice bath.

Perhaps tomorrow.

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p.s. does anyone else find it odd that if you google "Russian Phrases" the first thing that comes up is a page from a dating site with phrases like "I liked your photo and message very much" and "I dream to meet a woman to share my life with." I especially like this sequence "You are so soft. You are so gentle. You are so delightful. You are so supernatural!"

For whatever reason neither of us think the child will be born today. Right now I feel it will be tomorrow night, Jenn has been cagey.

We keep wanting to do things, but it's hard to make plans in more than 6 hour chunks of time, especially when our doctor keeps telling us it could be any minute.

Still we try not to think too much about the actual timing, because if we do, we become like kids waiting for a Christmas that never comes.

In some ways these last days have been the hardest of an otherwise easy pregnancy. Balance is an issue. Clothes don't fit. The belly is itchy. Stuff like that. All that said, Jenn has been calm and productive. We've been cracking each other up. The mood is light.

My dad just told me when my mom was pregant with my youngest brother, she went out and cut the grass which threw her right into labor. Jenn with a lawnmower would be quite a site. Sadly we have no yard.

It's windy and sunny after a night of rain. The house has been quiet except for my tunes playing in the attic office and the sound of the whirlybird on the roof.

I've been informed we are going out for a walk.

stay tuned..

Everyone keeps asking how we are feeling... obviously things are very different for me than they are for my wife. She's about to go through an experience that is physical, possibly frightening, and deeply emotional. Actually she's calm as a cucumber. For me, well of course it could never be as intense in the same way, but we both have full knowledge that in a few days (hell, possibly today) everything will be transformed (the truth is I've been a bit agitated). So it's one of those funny inflection points in life where you know that you'll be on the other side of the mountain soon, but you don't know what it looks like over on the other side, you don't know where the path is yet, you don't know how long it will take, and there are all sorts of hidden dangers on the way. So right now we stand there looking at it in the distance, contemplating it, and heading inexorably towards it, knowing that one way or another we'll get to the other side as long as we keep going..

Something like this:

Technically speaking, the baby is due tomorrow, but practically speaking it could be up to two weeks...

We're getting lots of pressure from friends and family (as if there was something we could do)...

If you are into classical music and the Brooklyn Bridge, I can highly recommend catching a performance at Barge Music. It's a floating barge that has been converted into a small concert hall right on the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. There's a fireplace inside, and you have views of lower Manhattan bobbing in the background. Kind of an awesome New Yorky thing to do. Jenn and I (and my parents) enjoyed it thouroughly.

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My wife objected to the size of the picture of her that I posted yesterday. I have now reduced it 50%. She generally objects to my posting pictures of her, but I do it anyway.

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It's already after midnight. November 28th. A nice day to be born I think.

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Did I mention I've been thinking about Jenn's dad lately. We don't have many pictures of him, and in many of those that we do have he is sitting in or standing next to a car. The images don't give away much.

What would he have thought of us and this life we have?

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What do other people hope for their children befoe they are born? After her health, I hope our daughter will travel well. I hope she can get out there and see the world while she is young so the experiences become part of her and that she is free from fear. Is that a strange thing to put on someone not yet here.

We went to a restaurant tonight on Ludlow that featured a non-reversing mirror in the bathroom. I've always heard that these mirrors freak people out, but I looked fairly normal.

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After spending a good 25 years of my life typing in front of a computer virtually every day, today I discovered my dad had no idea how a word processor worked. He seemed truly amazed.... "so it's like a piece of paper that you write on".

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No, no news.

It was only after the meal, when we were cleaning up, that I realized I totally forgot to take any pictures.

Sad. It was a good time all around, and delicious to boot.

...we were celebrating Becky's birthday early with Jenn's family. Jenn was cooking a major Thanksgiving feast. Tonight Becks is doing most of the cooking and we're expecting my family...

Weird to think how much has changed in a year... and how much is the same.

I think about the old house sometimes and wonder what's going on in there, but that life is already distant.

As much as I enjoy actual weather here on the East Coast and as much as I have enjoyed the fall, sometimes I miss waking up in that light filled bedroom on Lakewood Ave. and the sound of all those birds every morning...

It was not much to look at on the outside, but inside it was so darned pleasant...

I believe the apple pie has just emerged from the oven. Smells delicious. I'm going down to check it out.

No. No baby news yet. Technically Jenn's not even due for another week but since 2 of our friends recently had their kids early, we've been in it-could-happen-any-minute mode for about a week.

So we wait. It actually reminds me of travelling around the South America or Tibet. Your truck or bus breaks down and you wait. Could be a day, could be a week, the secret is to just be patient.

Does anyone happen to have 5gs to spend on me for Christmas?
This is nuts.

Do you like snow? Architecture? Well the Snow Show is for you.

My favorites are the work by Cai Guo-Qiang + Zaha Hadid, Future Systems + Anish Kapoor, and Tadao Ando + Tatsuo Miyajima.

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What about water and architecture?

Today in my quest to catalog family negatives I hit a batch from 1966 when my dad was in Vietnam. He had just bought a camera while on R&R in Hong Kong (a Pentax that was to become my first camera years later) and took pictures to send home. My mom was living in Monterrey, was pregnant, and was understandably worried, so most of the pictures he sent were of himself smiling and with friends. The images are usually labeled. "Beach at Vin Tau", or "Enjoying C-Rations", "Chuck Connors and Anne Margaret on USO tour", or something else innocuous.

But occasionally in the margins of the images you'll spot something that speaks to the seriousness of what was going on. There in the background of an infirmary shot, a body covered in a sheet with a prominent toe tag. Or of dark plumes of smoke in the distance. Tonight I was struck by these two images:

I also noted the progression of pictures. He took less than one roll a month, and usually the pictures were portraits of people or documentation of events. But in the last month, he shot many rolls, of the barracks, of the earth, of the sky, of the waterbuffalo beyond the fences, finally a flurry images unframed out the window of a jeep as he was headed for his last helicoptor ride out. It was as if he was straining to capture something of the place to hold on to. I know because I do the same thing.

Sometimes I doubt the existence of Australia.