About three weeks away

Now we're a little more than three weeks away from her due date. The pregnancy has been normal and free of complications. There was a lot of concern in the beginning because of Victoria's "advanced age" - (which sounds so funny because she's 35, but I guess that's over the hill in pregnancy world) and because of all of the difficulty we had conceiving in the first place.

We've been attending a variety of classes recently. They're interesting, informative, bizarre, frightening... With all of the potential problems, safety issues, illnesses, and accidents, it's amazing that anyone lives past the age of three! The last class we went to shows forceps and vacuums sucking babies out of their comfortable maternal homes. Crazy. The whole thing is just crazy to me.

There is so much I've never even had to consider in my life before: besides all of the obvious stuff like cribs, diapers, bottles, and tiny clothes; there's burping, latching, pumping, soft spots, strollers, cord care, car seats, a seemingly endless list that will grow with each inch of his height.

Oh yeah, did I mentioned that we're having a boy? When we found out that we were going to have a baby, I truly didn't have a preference. I would have been happy with either gender. Really. But once we found out, and we started shopping for stuff, it occured to me that boys have much cooler toys. The hard part, though, is naming him. We came up with lots of girl names. Girl names were flying out of our mouths like an infant's projectile vomit. For boy names, however, it's like verbal constipation. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that no one has anything positive to say about the names that we do choose. They love to tell us about every negative connotation and association they have with each name. I gotta tell you - it's not helpful. I don't care that a little boy with the same name wouldn't kiss you when you were six! That doesn't help me! We try not to tell people about the names we're considering - just for that reason, but then they harp on you, "You haven't even narrowed it down? You're not even considering any at all?" Then you look like an idiot for not having any names yet. So you cave. Then they go on about how much they hate the name. This process has been repeated about once a week for the last four months. Totally stupid.