In news that no one else cares about: Congratulations to Rupert Murdoch on his successful acquisition of the Dow Jones & Co., and with it, the Wall Street Journal. Of course, the fact that the man who brought you The Star and Fox News now owns one of the nation's bastions of great print journalism pretty much means that the Journalistic End Times are upon us. And that it's just a matter of time before the Journal plays patriotic theme music when you open it and gives front-page coverage to Britney Spears complete with commentary by Bill O' Reilly.

So, you know, cheers. I think I'm going to cry.

A couple of weeks ago, Dan went to San Antonio to be part of the wedding of his sister, Hannah, and our new brother-in-law, Joshua. I wasn't able to attend, but the family was kind enough to put together a CD of pictures from the weekend for me. Since there are other family members who weren't able to attend the wedding, here are a few of the pictures from what was obviously a beautiful day.

Hannah and maid of honor Dinah:

Hannah and the beautiful mother of the bride:

The ceremony was performed by Uncle Jack:

I could be wrong, but I think this is Josh's dad, his best man, with Josh, Hannah and maid of honor Dinah:

And of course, we have the triplets, Sammy, Blaine and Dani, holding down the fort as ringbearers and flower girl:

Congratulations to Josh and Hannah Butcher!

Today, Dan and I were running around town doing a variety of baby-related errands. Dan has been kindly dropping me off right at the front of stores so that I don't have to trudge through the heat on the way in, a small act of kindness that I appreciate more than words can say. He was getting ready to do this at Target when he saw a really great parking spot and told me to just stay in the car. As we were pulling into the spot, he said he was sorry for making me walk a little further, but he was afraid he wouldn't get the space if he waited. I said I understood and it was no problem. Then we had one of those moments that makes me realize how lucky I am to be married to someone who knows how to make me laugh. Because Dan said:

"Well who could blame you? You've gotta lock that down."

Which, for those of you who are not named Cody, is a reference to this moment from our favorite defunct TV show, Arrested Development. The setup is that Michael, the main character of the show, is going to meet the parents of his son Michael's girlfriend, Ann to warn them that he thinks his son, George Michael, is about to ask their daughter to get "pre-engaged" even though they are in high school.

No one else would probably even catch that reference, but I laughed the whole time we were in Target. There aren't many people who can make me laugh that much with just a few words. So it's nothing profound, but I think it makes my list of reasons it's great to be married.

There are a lot of parenting things that I don't have strongly-held views about, which is probably good since I have zero credentials to back me up, and I've been told that proclaiming your opinions about child-rearing before you have a child to rear is a really good way to guarantee that you have a child who refuses to conform to your plans. But the one thing I feel safe saying, as a certified English major, is that reading is better than television watching.

So I enjoyed this article. Of course, it kind of makes me laugh that we need a study to tell us that it's not particularly good for kids to watch a lot of TV. But that's why we've got a nice little starter library going for Kate, including such literary classics as "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" and "The Giving Tree."

Which brings me to my point: I keep a running list of books that I want to read, and it's probably realistic to expect for that list to be replaced by books I want to read to Kate for a while. That is totally fine with me, so long as they're good books, but I need some help making the list. So what was your favorite book when you were a kid?

Here is one of the weirdest things about expecting a baby in America, land of consumers, home of the brave: People mail you diapers. Not so much "people" as "whoever is in charge of consumer marketing for large diaper manufacturing companies," but you get my drift. A few months ago, diapers just started showing up in our mail. It's always one diaper, wrapped in colorful packaging that includes coupons in case you should one day decide you would like to buy more of these fabulous diapers. And the first time, I felt weird about it, like you would if someone mailed you any other personal hygiene product intended mainly for the absorption of bodily fluids. But now, I don't even blink. "Credit card bill, check, catalogs, check, Huggies, check." I do hope the neighbors are aware of the diaper-mailing phenomenon. If not, they probably just think I'm carrying a diaper with me to and from the mailbox everyday, like I'm trying to be prepared in case I run across a kid with a dirty diaper on the way or something.

The other interesting diaper-related trend of baby-having today is the diaper cake. Yes, diaper cakes. These are centerpieces for baby showers made of diapers rolled up and arranged in the shape of a three-tiered cake. They're actually pretty cool, because you get 70 or 80 diapers, and there are usually other goodies like onesies and bibs and such tucked in as decorations. I have seen these before, because my friend Erika, who is fantastically good at making beautiful and crafty things, once made one for a friend's baby shower. But until recently, I had never taken one apart.

That changed on Saturday. A couple of months ago, my co-workers at my former job threw me a baby shower/going away party. Included in the shower gifts we received were not one, but two diaper cakes due to a mix-up with one of the orders. These sat in the baby's room until this weekend, when we started doing some actual setting up of furniture in the nursery, and the inevitable happened: Dan saw the diaper cakes and wanted to go get his Leatherman tool and dismantle them to see what was in them.

At first I laughed at him for breaking out the He-Man pocket tool for a diaper cake, but it turns out that these things are a major feat of engineering. Among other things, we had to cut through multiple layers of tape and styrofoam that held the cake in place. And then once we got down to individual diapers, we found that they were rolled up into little cylinders secured with rubber bands. As a woman, I thought "What a clever design!" As a man, Dan thought "Wow. These look like grenades!" So he spent the rest of the time we were in the room throwing them at me and making little explosion noises.

One day, we do need to have a little boy for Dan to play with. Otherwise, he might start teaching Kate how to make his grenade-throwing face.

OK. A whole bunch of you have left comments here suggesting that I need to take a picture of my large self and put it on the blog. I suspect that you are doing this purely for your own amusement and to give you conversation topics, similar to the reason people watch really bizarre clips on You Tube and then immediately turn to whoever is closest to them and say "Dude, you have GOT to check this out." We all want to look at a train wreck. I'm totally on to you. But I'm going to give you what you want anyway.

So first, I want you to consider this photo, taken a few months ago. I show you this photo because I remember that I was taking it specifically for the purpose of demonstrating the visual concept of "Wow, look at my stomach!"

The previous photo makes me laugh now. Here's why:

There are more pictures that I'll post soon related to the super-fun weekend of nursery furniture assembly we just had. But for now I'll just leave you to ponder that photo and the fact that we are supposedly going to have a baby in something like 21 days. That should scare you, but I bet it doesn't, because you're thinking "Dude. I am going to cancel my cable subscription. This is going to be funnier than reality TV!" Yes, yes it is. And with more baby poop.

This is a picture of a part of my life that has never gone particularly well. It's a houseplant:

This particular houseplant is, allegedly, a plumeria. Plumerias are a beautiful plant that grow like mold in Hawaii and on my mother-in-law's porch in San Antonio, Texas. They grow in Texas because my mother-in-law has done a fabulous job of bringing them back from her trips to Hawaii and transplanting them. She has at least six of them, and they have grown into trees that bloom luscious, sweet-smelling flowers all summer long.

Well, I have a plumeria too, because when Dan and I were dating, his family took a vacation to Hawaii, and his mom sent me a cutting for a plumeria, which I planted in a pot, where, for about a year, it looked like a stick in a pot. In fact, when I dropped this plant off at the home of my friends Gwyn and Mondo to be plant-sat in Clovis, New Mexico while I went home to get married to Dan, Gwyn made the mistake of trying to ask about the plant, which always goes the same way: "What should I do with the, ummm ... I'm sorry, what is it exactly that you're growing here?"

Once we moved into our apartment in Albuquerque, the plant did slightly better, putting out a few leaves due to the sun on the porch. But once the weather turned cold, it had to be moved inside, and its leaves yellowed and died and it looked, once again, like some horticultural radiation victim. People would come over for dinner and see it sitting there in the dining room and try not to ask about it, but eventually they would say "So, what kind of a plant is that .... It is a plant, isn't it?"

There have been many times I have been convinced that the plumeria was dead, and I've considered just admitting defeat, throwing it away, and acting like I don't remember my foray into tropical gardening. But instead, I water it and fertilize it, and these days, it has a nice crop of green leaves that I'm proud of, even though I know, in my heart, after five years, that it is never, ever going to make any flowers no matter what I do. Still, my mother-in-law hasn't lost faith in my ability to grow this plant, in spite of my repeated demonstrations of ineptness. Last time we were in San Antonio, she gave me a cutting off of one of her own trees so that I could start another plant. Apparently, she's now working on the theory that the plant itself is biologically challenged, and that's very gracious of her, since what's closer to the truth is probably that I am just a hopeless gardener. I've decided to embrace her optimism, and so as you can see if you look behind the big plant in the photo, I've stuck the new little plant in a pot of its own and am dutifully tending to it in hopes that it will flourish. It's a baseless hope, but one I'm fond of these days nonetheless. It's good to have hope.

Who knows? Maybe it will work out. After all, I may not have had much luck growing fabulous, sweet-smelling tropical flowers, but I am the undisputed queen of growing weeds. We really are going to pull those up this weekend. And by "we" I mean "Dan."

A brief history of this blog:

Missing Mississippi was started in September of 2004 as a way for me to keep in touch with family and friends all over the country, but primarily those in my home state of Mississippi. It served that purpose well, and as anticipated, had a grand total of about four readers, all of whom were directly related to Dan or I. However, the life of the blog took an unexpected turn in March of 2005.

Among my four siblings, I have two sisters, Hannah and Audrey, and twin brothers, Ryan and Aaron, both of whom are United States Marines. In early 2005, Aaron was deployed to Iraq. On March 18, 2005, the military convoy in which Aaron was driving was attacked. Aaron was injured and lost his left leg below the knee as a result of his wounds. In the days that followed the news of Aaron’s injury, my parents were inundated by phone calls from friends and family members who, understandably, wanted to know the latest news about Aaron. For a few days, there wasn’t much to tell, as Aaron was being stabilized in Germany so that he could be flown home to recuperate. It was a time of enormous anxiety and uncertainty, and while I know it was only a few days in reality, it still seems like a small eternity when I think about it.

Out here in Albuquerque, I felt very helpless and isolated. My going to Mississippi wouldn’t have done any good at the time, and neither would my presence at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Aaron’s wife, Kelly, and my parents were already gathering to be with Aaron when he arrived. But it was difficult to be far away from my family and go about my life as usual during a time of such upheaval. So, desperate for something useful to do, I offered to use the blog as a central place to post information and prayer requests about Aaron so that people could get the updates they wanted.

And that is how, in a matter of days, the blog went from being this weird little project that Dan and I were doing to having Web traffic numbers in the hundreds. Friends and family were checking for information, as expected. But it soon became apparent that through church prayer chains, word of mouth, and links from other blogs, people we had never met and may never meet in this life were keeping up with our story. I could have quit my full time job and done nothing but field emails from people who were reading and praying for us. It was astonishing.

The blog was almost entirely dedicated to posts about Aaron and our family for a period of several months. If you want to read those posts, the best way is to click on the category called "Supporting My Troops"

To say that Aaron made a full recovery would be an understatement. As of this writing, in August of 2007, he’s nearing completion of his undergraduate degree at Mississippi State University and planning to head off to law school next year. If you know Aaron or read about him here, it won’t surprise you to hear that he’s got big plans for the future. As for his leg, it’s not really something he or any of us really give a lot of thought to anymore. I can't speak for everyone else in the family, but for me at least, it's not that I forget Aaron was hurt. It's just that it no longer seems like the thing that will matter the most about his story, or our family's story, years and years from now.

But occasionally, I will go back and read over the things I wrote during that period of time. And while it’s hard to do that because it reminds me of what it felt like to be so afraid and to have so many questions, I always come away marveling again at the incredible grace and mercy our family experienced then. I think that’s why I leave all of it on the Web site – to remind myself, and anyone else who wants to read, that God is good, even in hard things.

These days, the blog is back to what it was originally meant to be: Just a nice place to post photos, tell stories, and let people in on our lives a little. So if you are new here, welcome. And if you’ve been here all along, thanks for coming back.

Welcome to what should appear for you as the newly redesigned blog. (If you're not seeing a lovely blue color and a new banner, or if you're seeing some of those things but they seem to be misaligned in some way, try clicking the refresh button in your Web browser.I also hear there may be some problems for those of you viewing in Safari. Until we figure that out, Firefox and Internet Explorer seem to handle the changes better.) Ever since the web hosting fiasco of 2007, Dan and I have been plotting a move to a new hosting service, and we figured that since the blog is three years old in September, this would also be a good time to give our online selves a makeover. "It will be easy!" we said. "We'll just tweak a few things here and there, no big deal!"

Well, that's not what happened. It turns out that since we started the blog three years ago, I have spent a lot of time reading blogs. And while that is a good thing, it has also given me some very definite, picky, deeply-held opinions about what I do and do not like in blog design, and therefore, what I do and do not find acceptable on my own blog. This made Dan's job, as the can't-get-out-of-it-because-I'm-married-to-her Web designer in the family, infinitely more difficult. Dan would labor over some piece of Movable Type code for an hour or so and then show it to me, and I would say "Umm, yeah, sort of like that, but with less rounded edges." And then I would wander off to let him figure out what that meant. I am fairly sure that professional Web designers have terminated client contracts for less. So first and foremost, please give Dan a nice round of applause for making my blog look just exactly like I wanted it to, even though I didn't really know what I wanted at any stage of the process.

And now for a tour of the changes. First off, we have our new banner, which I love, and which you may recognize as featuring the work of my wildly talented future brother-in-law, Nashville photographer Daniel Meigs. This photo (full image available here) is very meaningful to me, because Daniel took it from the porch of my parents' home in Oloh, Mississippi in 2004, one early morning when the mist from the lake was hanging between the trees in this beautiful way that you can only see if you look at just the right moment. It makes me sound like more of a tree-hugger than I really am, but I loved those pine trees, and less than a year later, the majority of them were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. I have a copy of this picture hanging in my living room, and it is one of my most treasured possessions. Still, Daniel probably now wishes that I didn't love the photo quite that much, since my passion for it led us to ask for permission to use a portion of it for the blog, thus dragging Daniel into our convoluted world of amateur Website building. In recent weeks, Daniel has patiently adjusted this photo time and time again when we changed our minds about how big it should be, and he has never once complained. So many thanks to him for his generosity with his time and his work. We're making him work hard to get into this family, and he just keeps taking the abuse. It's amazing, really.

One thing I'm really excited about is that we now have a blog roll. As I mentioned, I read a lot of blogs, and I have long wanted to link to those sites, but we just never got around to figuring out how to set that up. So while I realize that everyone else thinks blog rolls are, like, so 1999, I am pretty psyched about having mine up and running after three years of meaning to get one. Hopefully you'll find some new blogs to frequent, since I think I have some pretty entertaining friends. And if I've inadvertently left your blog out of the list, let me know and I'll add you.

Comments! We also now have a nifty comment display area to the right of entries. I have wanted one of these, because a lot of the time, someone will leave a comment on an archived page and I never see it. Now I will know everything that you write on my site. Which may or may not be a good thing.

Finally, in the top corner, where archives and the basic information about the site is located, I've added a brief history of the blog to explain a few things that could be confusing if you were new here and just clicking randomly through the archives, as I know people do from time to time. It's nothing anyone who has been here a while doesn't already know, I just thought it would be helpful. Also, I might be kidding myself, but I do feel like the blog has had an interesting three years of life.

That just about covers everything. Let us know if you're having any trouble seeing the new site in its new location, and tell us what you think!

Sometimes it is interesting to me to think about how much of the plot line of my life would not have been possible in a time before air travel, long-distance telephone lines, the Internet, or the U.S. Postal Service. Really big things would be missing, like my husband, who I first started getting to know via email. (It wasn't as weird as it sounds, I promise, but that's a story for another time.)

And then there are these girls. Because we all went to a summer camp in Horn Creek, Colorado when I was 15, these ladies have been my friends for 12 years now, and the vast majority of our relationships have been conducted via letter, phone, and, in more recent years, group emails. One theory on why we're still close is the potential for blackmail. Think about it: Anyone would be well-advised to keep close tabs on people they wrote long letters to in the ninth grade, since at any given time, those people could choose to post your adolescent ramblings on the Internet if they felt slighted by you in some way. We've dug some of those letters up and read them aloud to the sounds of hysterical laughter on more than one occasion when we've gotten together as adults. You couldn't make up anything more side-splittingly melodramatic if you tried. There are lots of exclamation points. But that's not the main reason we're still in touch. It's just that we really love each other, and we've made a large effort over the years to stay in one another's lives, and that has brought with it tremendous blessing.

This week, it also meant that I was the recipient of a baby-shower-by-mail. The girls all sent gifts, and Rebecca sent me a packet of streamers and balloons to hang and treats to eat while I opened my gifts. It sounds silly, but my first connections to these people started to grow from written words in envelopes that would come to me in the mail, so in a way, it was almost more fitting that that was also how they celebrated the upcoming arrival of my first child. Not that I'd turn down the chance to have them all in the room to open the gifts. But it didn't feel any less natural to be looking at the postmarks from Washington, D.C., Nebraska, North Carolina, and even Scotland and thinking about how my friends all put these gifts in their envelopes and sent them off with so much love and care in places so far away from here. They've been doing that for me for years, and I'm so thankful.

So here are a few pictures from my long-distance shower. First, the pile of mail I got.

Charity made these great "Official Horn Creek Baby Shower" labels that were on all the gifts so that I would know to set the gifts aside until they all arrived. Notice how I have draped myself in the pink streamers.

And here is the absolute haul of stuff that we got for Kate. Never let it be said that I don't have incredibly generous friends. Especially since this counts as the third baby shower I've been given in this pregnancy!

It will be a year before I see these girls again, since our usual lakehouse Labor Day get-together has been pre-empted by some conflicting travel plans and, oh yes, the fact that I conveniently managed to be due to have a baby on Labor Day this year. But I know that when we do get together next, it will be like we never left summer camp. It always is. Girls, I hope my daughter one day makes a few friends like you.

Last night, we finally put the finishing touches on the nursery. We figured that, ten days before the baby's due date, we should probably stop procrastinating. But before you can appreciate the nursery, you have to see what this room looked like for the last year that we've lived in the house. It was an extra bedroom with no furniture, so it became a magnet for those boxes of stuff that everyone has and no one needs, as demonstrated here:

It was actually Dan who had the first idea for what we should do with the nursery, which was good, because I was really lacking in ideas for some reason. But Dan suggested that we should paint the room a nice, light blue color. We had this whole conversation about how we know blue is traditionally the baby boy color, but we just like it, and we should pick a color we like since it's not like the baby is going to care. And when I went to New York in February, Dan took it upon himself to clear the room out and paint it. So it sat, empty, but painted, until very recently, when the Marathon of Furniture-Building began. Really, it was just a crib and a dresser, but both came in giant boxes containing 26 random-looking pieces of white wood and 36,000 pieces of hardware, along with the obligatory multi-lingual assembly instructions containing inexplicable pictures that are supposed to make it obvious how Piece 26 fits into socket A-7. It's a good thing I have Dan, or I'd have given up and Kate would be sleeping in a laundry basket. Here's the great carpenter at work:

Now, I already told you that it was Dan's idea to paint the nursery blue. I followed that theme and bought blue and white polka dot crib linens and swiss dot curtains, and we put together our white furniture. And then Dan stood back, looked at the room, and said "Do you think it looks a little too much like a boy's room? Maybe we should buy something pink."

As his contribution, Dan bought Kate a little stuffed pink lamb toy when he was on a business trip, which will appear in the next photos. But it was my job to figure out how we were going to make this blue room girly. Which is where the butterflies come in. I bought them from Land of Nod:

And with accessories successfully added, we finished the room. Here it is:

Inside the crib, complete with the Boppy, and Winky the pink lamb. That's what the tab said her name was.

The changing table where Dan will be changing lots and lots of diapers. Right?

And a couple more:

And so, thanks to Dan and his awesome interior design, furniture-building, blinds-installing, curtain-hanging skills, we have a nursery. Now we just need a baby. As a heads up, the "Guess When the Baby Will be Born" contest will begin soon, so start thinking about your bets. I'll let you know when it's time to formally record them in the comments section.

Alright, folks. It's time to place your bets on what day you think Baby Kate will make her appearance. A few things you might want to take into consideration when making your predictions: She is due in nine days, on September 3, which is Labor Day. Yes, have a good laugh at that one. But, of course, only a few babies are actually born on their due dates, and if family history matters, it's worth noting that the women on my mom's side of the family, and my mom herself, went into labor before their due dates. One date that is already popular is August 27, this Monday. This is the date that both my mom and grandmother have settled on because it is a full moon, and as labor and delivery nurses will tell you, a lot of women seem to go into labor around then. But my mother-in-law, meanwhile, is rooting for August 31, because it is her birthday, and she has apparently decided that the average birthday gift is just not going to cut it this year. She must have a grandbaby instead. Dan has decided that August 30 must be the day that Eliana was referring to when she made her prediction, because she says it will be rainy and cold, and the predicted weather for that day is possible storms and a high temperature of 81, which is cold for this time of year. But he hasn't made a choice of his own yet.

As for the contest rules, I think it's fine if people want to pick a day that someone else has already chosen, because there will be no prizes, so it's not going to cost me anything if more than one of you are right. But you will have bragging rights. So with all of that information at your disposal, go to it. Try to be kind with your post-due-date guesses, because I am really starting to get tired of being pregnant, and if you suggest that this baby isn't coming until September 14 or something, I might get depressed. And if you're right, I might have to hurt you later.

Happy Sunday morning everyone. Dan and I are a bit bleary-eyed today after an exciting Saturday evening. (Warning: There is no baby at the end of this story. Didn't want to disappoint anyone.) Around 7, we were making dinner, and I started having contractions. Not really very painful, but definitely happening regularly, anywhere from five to 15 minutes apart. When this was still gong on at around 10, we decided it might be time to at least pile all of our hospital trip stuff into one corner of the bedroom so we would know where all of it was if we needed it. At the time, I actually said "If I go ahead and pack the suitcase, the contractions will stop." But we kept timing, and the contractions kept coming. Some of them were getting somewhat painful, but they were still pretty random in terms of the intervals between. Around 11, we decided to go to bed since all the books tell you "If you're in early labor, try to get some rest, because you're going to need it." But it turns out to be pretty much impossible to go to sleep if you think you might be about to have a baby or some such life-changing event, so we were up just talking and waiting and timing some more. Long story short, the contractions continued until almost 2 a.m. and then just ... stopped. So Baby Kate tricked us, and today we're tired. I'm sure this is just the first of countless times she'll help us avoid the dangers of a full night's sleep.

Anyone have any fun false labor stories to make us feel less silly?

One of my journalistic heroes, Bob Johnson, died this weekend. From the news coverage, you can tell that he was a lot of things to a lot of people and had a truly remarkable career in print journalism. But for me, Mr. Johnson, who in his retirement years founded the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, was the distinct, booming voice on the phone who would reassure me, a young reporter at one small newspaper or another, that no, various public entities could most certainly not withold public documents from my newspaper. Then he would sit on the phone and patiently dictate a letter helping me cite just exactly what clause of the New Mexico Open Records Act made it illegal for me to be denied access. Those letters somehow always managed to convey both the facts and an undercurrent of deep moral outrage at the mere suggestion that the information in question could be witheld. That combination was rather effective, and a good majority of the time, the records would be handed over without much delay. But more importantly, I never got off the phone with Mr. Johnson without feeling more empowered, both as a reporter, and as a citizen. He is one of the people who helped me understand this very important truth: Your government works for you, and 99.9 percent of the time, you are fully entitled to know what it is is doing with its money, its policies, and its operations. Anyone who tells you differently is ill-informed or lying, but if you know your rights, you're a lot harder to fool.

So thank you, Mr. Johnson. You will be missed.

One week from the due date, we're finding interesting ways to pass the time. For instance: When Dan talks on the phone, he tends to walk around the house. But the other day, I found him talking on the phone and practicing driving the baby stroller in circles around the dining room table.

My only concern is that he might only master driving in circles during his self-imposed stroller driver's ed and give the baby an early case of motion sickness.

The full moon last night was beautiful and huge and golden-red when it rose over the mountains in that way it does here in the high desert, but it did not help me go into labor as predicted by a few people. I even went out and took a long walk after it got dark outside because that's one of the things my doctor has advised me to do in my ongoing quest to coax this baby out, but to no avail. It was a nice walk anyway and I'll probably go again tonight. But I think taking walks by myself after dark may be the only leaving of my house that I do for a couple of days, sheerly because I am starting to have a strong desire to avoid strangers after my adventures yesterday.

Yesterday, I decided to go out and take one more shot at trying to buy bedroom lamps to replace a set that blew up (literally) earlier this summer. I've gone looking several times, but have never found what I wanted at a price I was willing to pay. So, since I have accomplished pretty much every other task I can even think of to do around the house, including obsessive cleaning of both of our cars so they will be all nice when we have relatives in town after the baby comes, I thought I would take my extremely clean car and look for lamps. It has been a few days since I have been out and about for an extended period of time by myself just because I've mostly been doing errands with Dan or doing stuff at home lately. And apparently in the time that has elapsed since my last outing, I have crossed whatever threshold of absolute hugeness there is that takes away any inhibitions strangers have about talking to you about your pregnancy for insane lengths of time. I wish I had been carrying a video camera so that I could post footage of the lengthy conversations I conducted with random people. A saleslady in the Bombay Company took it upon herself to guess that the baby is a boy from the way I am carrying, and when told that it is a girl, she refused to believe me and followed me around the store talking about it while I looked at lamps. Her colleague also walked with me and assured me that Peggy (her name is Peggy) has been about 98 percent accurate at guessing the gender of people's babies. I told her that if the baby turned out to be a boy, I would be sure to come back and tell her so she could have her record back. Then I fled the store.

In Target, the woman in line in front of me asked when I was due, and when she found out that I am supposed to have Kate the day she had her son last year, proceeded to park her cart even though she was all checked out and could have left and told me her entire birth story in great detail and then walked out to the parking lot with me asking me if I was planning to stay home or go back to work. I actually felt awkward when I had to tell her that my car was on the other side of the parking lot from hers and I needed to go now. I was worried that maybe she was going to hug me goodbye or something.

At another furniture place, the saleslady asked me if my mom was excited about the baby, and when I told her yes, that it is the first grandchild for both our parents, she gushed for ten minutes about her own first grandchild and how she calls every day to talk to her on the phone. That was a sweet story, and she was a very nice lady, but what was strange to me was that people who are supposedly there to sell you things were requiring me to stand and talk to them for ten minutes before they would even allow me to view their merchandise. This is the fascination that my pregnant figure holds for people. It's like they can't help themselves.

Eventually, late in the day, I did what I should have done in the first place, and went to my favorite consignment store in the world (brief commercial here) Consignment Interiors in the Mountain Run Shopping Center on Eubank near Juan Tabo. My friend Judi and I love that place, and I always seem to find what I'm looking for there. And so, of course, within 15 minutes of walking in (after my obligatory ten minute pregnancy chat with the saleslady) I found the perfect lamps. I am just bored enough and proud enough of them to show them to you and tell you that I got them both for $40, and they are similar to these lamps which are much more expensive:

So, in conclusion, my findings are that the full moon does not seem to have any effect on labor and delivery. However, it does seem to bring me good deals and impair people's social judgment. Stay tuned for our next installment: "Wandering Around Your Neighborhood Late at Night: Labor-Inducer or Stalker Behavior?"