John Jacob Jingleheimer has a nice ring to it

Someone is testing out all this new equipment we have in the house. He just doesn't seem to understand that none of these are actually cat toys/beds/slings/carriers.

We are going to spend a chunk of the weekend sorting through all the copious goodies we have received from dear friends and family. I'm still not really sure what we even have yet other than nearly everything we could need for a new baby. We have all the basics except for some diapers and a baby. Well and all that stuff we will have forgotten or never realized we needed until he's here.

Oh, and we need a name for this little guy, but I'm pretty much convinced we won't have one until he's actually here. I've gotten a bit superstitious about it, wanting to spend some time with him before I commit to any name. I figure if Jews won't buy baby items until the little bundle arrives, I don't need to start monogramming onesies for someone I haven't met yet.

It took us at least a week to name all our pets once we got them, so I can't imagine we'll be much faster with a newborn. I'm also enjoying the "not quite here yet"-ness of not having a name picked out. We'll have plenty of opportunities to wear out whatever name we choose once he's here. But right he's got every name under the sun at his disposal. Why fence him in?

Brown is the new black

I had long hair in high school. Crazy long hair. When I went to college, I decided to keep that crazy long hair. I kept it all the way through dating Steve, adding a blond streak in the front (which I did myself with peroxide and a toothbrush). Then once I was dating Jeremy, I decided to go to Hokie Hair and cut it up to my chin.

Once I made that plunge of cutting off a significant chunk of my hair (which I still have saved in an envelope from 1995 - pack rat!), suddenly I wasn't so emotionally attached to it anymore. So I started experimenting. I added some highlights. And then I went nuts and cut it all off.

That sated me for a while, but I was growing restless. I walked in and told my stylist I wanted to be blond.

Joseph: "You can't be blond. We'd have to bleach your hair." Me: "But how does Angelina Jolie get blond hair?" Joseph: "She bleaches it." Me: "Then why can't I have blond hair like she does?" Joseph: "Because she gets it touched up every two weeks and I'm lucky if you show up every eight weeks." Me: "Oh." Joseph: "We'll do foils. It will be fine."

So over time, my hair got more and more blond. It would grow out and be ridiculous (because Joseph is right and he was lucky if I would come back every eight weeks). But it was pretty much blond.

That's when I started to forget what my real hair looked like. It became a distant memory.

When I tired of blond, I decided I wanted red. We started with a few red highlights. Then, I brought in a picture from Iron Man and said I wanted strawberry blond.

That worked for a while but I soon discovered that dying one's hair red is really high maintenance, almost more than blond. It changes over time as you wash it. I felt like the horse of many colors from the Wizard of Oz.

I then had to plan my hair appointments around all social engagements, hoping to get 4 weeks of "good" color out of an eight week style. If I was going to a conference in the middle of June, I had to dye my hair two weeks before that so it would calm down enough to not look radioactive but still have some red in it by the beginning of August and not all have faded to blond.

The last time I dyed my hair (at the beginning of July) my aunt came over that day and told me I had street walker hair. Thanks, Sissy. I admit it was alarmingly bright. But with the blond chunky highlights on top, it was just bizarre. Two weeks later it was looking fairly normal. And even yesterday it was looking good in its light red shade except for the inch of dark brown roots all over.

Something had to give. I've been warned that one should not make major changes to one's hair while pregnant because it can cause devastating emotional damage. I was tempted to cut my hair short again to start over and get rid of all this damaged blond. But I resisted and stuck with just a new color.

I'm working my way back to my natural hair color, or at least a close facsimile of what I remember it being. And while I'm still not emotionally attached to my hair, I do feel better knowing I look more like "me".

What 50 years does for diapers and relationships

I went to my parents' this evening to show them a sample cloth diaper I bought (Rich requested I buy an orange one). I had talked to Mom about it last weekend and she was very suspicious of the whole thing, so I was hoping a sample would bring her on board. My oldest brother was born in 1959 so Mom used cloth diapers for him. Those diapers were the plain old squares that you had to perform fabric origami on to get them on the baby. She also didn't own a washing machine, so she was hand-washing diapers in the kitchen sink and hanging them out to dry on the line behind her and her first husband Lee's apartment.

Hanging the diapers out on the line in cold weather would make them freeze from the ocean winds. They would also wrap around both lines on the pulley system so you couldn't pull them back in. Her brother-in-law Squirrel (long story on that name) was the first one home in their apartment complex and would shimmy up the pole and pull the line down to untangle the diapers for my mother.

Mom paused and said, "He was a good man. I don't think Lee would have even known how to fix it, let alone done it when he got home."

I am in such a different world versus the one my mother was back in 1959. I think my mother is looking forward to this new generation of baby and all the goodies that come with it. Here's hoping no one has to climb up a pole to untangle the diapers, but between Rich, my father and several others we have a few good men to volunteer for that.

bonus belly shot from this evening while cuddling with the cat