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.