Today's Purple Scare FAQ: (Previous editions in June and August archives)

Where have you been all week? Yeah, yeah, I took a few days off. At 37 weeks of pregnancy I'm really tired a lot of the time, and my sleep schedule is totally whacked (what a great preview, eh?) And I don't have ready access to a computer for most of the day anymore, so I don't always get to post even when I want to.

37 Weeks? What's your due date? I went to the doctor on Friday, and we're maintaining an ETA of October 15 for Bizzleburp. Of course, we all know that maybe 5% of all babies show up on their actual "due date" as predicted by those fancy little wheels at the OB/GYN's office. One way or another Bizzleburp should be home by Halloween.

Okay, Bizzleburp. You're not really gonna call the baby that, are you? Of course not! Well, maybe as a nickname. But we are looking at alternatives for the birth certificate.

So, Big Question: Pink or Blue? The doctor's office has been really good about honoring our request that Biz's sex remain a mystery until The Big Day. At my last sonogram, I didn't spend as much time looking at the screen, just in case I inadvertently saw something that would give it away. But we got some great pictures from the neck up: another one of baby waving hello at us! Technology rocks.

What's up with the house? We close on October 1. The stuff we've had in storage for the past two years will be delivered the following week, as well as the stuff we had shipped by air from Europe. The surface shipment from Europe will probably arrive shortly after Bizzleburp (oh what fun that will be!!!!)

So you're moving into a new house and having a baby in the same month, maybe even the same two-week period. What are you, nuts? Sure sounds like it, doesn't it? It could be worse, I could be in Florida. Though I can relate to the folks with "hurricane fatigue" - you just get over one storm when another one pops up on the horizon.

This is part of the reason I removed work from the equation for a little while: I wanted to have some degree of control of the amount of stress I was dealing with.

So are you going back to work after your sabbatical is up? Uuuhhhh...Reply Hazy. Ask Again Later.

With the way we've financed the house, I don't have to go back to work. I could decide to stay home for a while. Or I could switch to a job that requires less traveling (which would be strange, as I work in the travel industry, but it is an option). Or I could get a totally new job in a different field. There are lots of choices out there - but none that I have to decide on right now. First things first: that means getting Bizzleburp home safe and sound.

On advice of counsel, I have been conducting a little revisionist history on the blog. Even though I maintain that the likelihood of my being positively identified among the five million bloggers in this hemisphere is pretty durned slim, it has been suggested that I delete certain archival material.
I have made a considerable effort to vague up personal references and comments about work in order to preserve my anonymity (and that of my employer). I know that other folks in the blogosphere and in the world before blogs have used their attitude problems to gain fame, fortune, more fame, and even infamy. This is not my goal. I'm just blogging to keep my family and friends informed about the myriad of changes happening in my somewhat confusing life, and to vent and rant like everyone else who takes up this weird little hobby. If someone other than my target audience comes across Purple Scare and is amused by it, welcome and thanks for dropping by, come again if you like.

Big Shout-Out to my homeboy who is a new dad today. And welcome to the gene pool, little guy.

If I shoot them, that will only delay settlement further. After I called the moving and storage guys to set dates for delivery of our stuff, I got a call from our realtor saying that the sellers can settle on October 1 after all. I should be very very happy. And deep down, I am. But I am also about to go Marvin the Martian on them: you are making me angry...(huff, huff, pace)...very very angry!

House Update: The radon test came back with a reading higher than recommended safe levels. The sellers have agreed to pay for someone to come in and do "remediation" (i.e. install a vent). Fair enough - in fact, it's pretty routine, I believe.
Radon can be some spooky stuff. If I didn't know that it was real, the description would sound like a schizophrenic's delusion: It's everywhere! But you can't see it, or smell it, or taste it, but it's radioactive and it permeates your house and it can give you cancer, so you should line your house with tinfoil and chant the Mickey Mouse Club theme song backwards twelve hours a day to protect yourself, bwahahahahaha. Okay, I made that last part up. Plastic sheeting is fine, it doesn't have to be tinfoil. So I'm not too worried about this whole radon thing.
On the downside, our sellers can't get a moving company booked until the 10th of October. This means that we settle and hand over keys five days before Bizzleburp's ETA. I suppose this means drawing up contingency plans to have someone else at the house directing the guys with the boxes in case I go into labor when the trucks show up. Either that or it means I'm nuts for going through with this.

Just because nobody asked, let me give you the highlights of yesterday's childbirth education class. (Hey, a pregnant lady gets LOTS of unsolicited advice, stories, and other information. I'm just giving back to the community.) The unquestionable highlight of the show was the video they showed us from the 1950s, to put into perspective for us how much more pleasant it is to give birth nowadays.
This was an instructional video for the U.S. Navy to give wives a preview of what it would be like for them to have their babies at a military hospital. Having sat through both this Navy video and Gone With the Wind, I would rather give birth in the middle of the siege of Atlanta, with Prissy standing by offering her mama's advice to put a knife under the bed to cut the pain in two.
Okay, what was the best part of this highly informative film? Maybe it was the fact that the patients were all shaved, then mopped down with iodine like meat on a barbecue grill. Or maybe it was the "bracelets" they used to hold the patients' arms in place, so they wouldn't risk "contaminating the sterilized perineal area". I liked the way they extolled the virtues of forceps, and in demonstrating their use looked like a dress rehearsal for the famous Roswell Alien Autopsy video. And just think, this was all to reassure those poor Navy wives and make them grateful for the fact that they were not going to be squatting in a rice paddy.
So yes, giving birth today is perhaps less tidy than it was in our mothers' time. We walk and talk and breathe funny and poop while we're in labor. And I'm sure the U.S. Navy is much improved these days (gads, I should hope so!!!). And yes, Bill Cosby is right, you know you're overeducated when you're taking classes to learn what comes naturally to billions of people. But you know, I'll take the postmodern approach any day. All in all, I feel good about my options for giving birth in a civilized, civilian facility with lots of room to walk around and lots of drugs on demand. I feel like I've achieved a happy medium between the rice paddy and the operating room. Lucky lucky me.

Yesterday's baby shower was a lot of fun. My sister- and mother-in-law flew down for the day and set up a very fine spread in my folks' house. My stepmom set out beautiful flowers and baked tasty cookies, and conspired with some sneaky folks to surprise me in a big way: my oldest and dearest friend flew in from another city with her 10-month-old daughter whom I hadn't met yet.
I continue to be amazed by the amount of sheer STUFF that one very small person needs just to maintain a 24-7 regimen of eating, sleeping, lying down, and pooping. But for me, the shower was not just about the stroller and swing and cuddly toys and oooohing and aaaaahing over aaaaaaaall that CUUUUUUUUTE stuff! I was delighted to see some friends I hadn't seen in months (or even years) and have a chance to catch up with people. It's nice to be reminded that I have lots of support and love from friends and family as I embark of this great adventure called Parenthood. It was a very, very good day.

The fun part about taking childbirth classes on Talk Like A Pirate Day is that you can practice labor-room cussing in really creative ways, or threaten to make your husband walk the plank.

House inspection today! The house passed with flying colors. Okay, we might want a new roof within the year but we can afford that. There aren't any leaks or anything, that's the most important part. The main guts of the house and the foundation are nice and solid. Happy happy happy, joy joy joy!

In other good news, yesterday's doctor appointment went very well. Bizzleburp is estimated to weigh 5 lbs 5 oz at 36 weeks. Sonogram pix show the baby waving at us. It is sooooo cool to recognize facial features, after all those months of "Alien" and "X-Files" shots. My latest constant craving is ice cream (gotta get that calcium!) - if Biz is a boy I might well end up naming him Ben and/or Jerry.

The good news is that we got the house. The bad news is that for the next week I'm gonna be looking at myself in the mirror and saying, "Hm, so that's what 400-thousand-plus dollars in debt looks like."

But we GOT THE HOUSE! Yeeeeehaaa!!!! We have a place to bring Bizzleburp home to! Woo hooo!!!!

Once more into the breach, brothers and sisters... We made an offer on the house we liked this weekend. As far as we know, we're the only bidders, but the possible hiccup is that we want a closing date of October 1. The owners were looking at something like October 15. Hmmmm...I might have a possible conflict around that time.
But as I've been saying all along, it's in the hands of Higher Powers at this point.
I did have a very nice lunch with my "other mom". My mom lives on the other coast, and I have a few "moms" in the old neighborhood - this one is the mother of my oldest friend, we go back to 2nd grade together, if you can believe that.) So we had a lovely time catching up and I got to eat real crab cakes for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long. And I have even held them down, several hours later. Looks as though yesterday's tummy troubles were an anomaly (I hope, I hope). Still a few burps and urps here and there, but from everything I've read and heard, that's typical for this stage. Oh boy.
My dear husband even went on a late-night grocery run last night when I wanted ginger ale. He came back with ice cream, too. Readers, I married him.
Next post: we hope to know whether or not we got the house. Until then, fingers crossed!

Homehunting has yielded another prospect this time it's a single family home, detached, in a nice little cul-de-sac. No jacuzzi tubs, but the price is much more reasonable and there's a lovely garden. No more comments on this one until we have some idea about whether we stand a chance of getting it.

I was supposed to go to the realtor's office this morning to sign some papers, but I had a relapse of morning tummy troubles. That hasn't happened since we got home, ugh. I suppose I couldn't escape it completely: now that we're really in the final stages of pregnancy (ETA: one month and two days) it's time for the return of heartburn. This is of course inevitable when your stomach is squished down to half its normal size and feels like it's been shoved halfway up into your rib cage. But I was really enjoying those few months when I could actually eat food like a normal person again. As many of you know, I spent most of the first trimester (and well into the second) extremely unwell. I really don't want to relive that - but at least on this side of the Atlantic I can have a steady supply of ginger ale.

Home-hunting Round Two commences Saturday morning. If we can't find anything by mid-month we might just cave in and find ourselves a rental. It's kinda hard to house-hunt when you are unsure about future income: we are shopping for location as though I were going back to work, but in a price range as though I were not. This is more than a little confusing. I don't relish the idea of moving several times in one year if we take an interim rental, but better to do that than to rush into a huge house we can barely afford or a shoebox we outgrow in three months. And did I mention all the stuff that's in storage? Ugh. Can't they just knock me out and wake me up when it's over?

Busy day today! We put in an offer on the house with the Jacuzzi. Alas, we were outbid. Back to square 1.5, I guess. Live and learn; Buddha will provide. At least we know where we stand moneywise.
We also visited the maternity ward at the hospital where Bizzleburp will likely make his or her debut. It looks pleasant enough, though if I were the tour guide I wouldn't have stood around asking, "any questions?" while half a dozen pregnant women were wincing and shifting their weight from foot to foot. All of us were having back twitches by the end of the 45-minute walkthrough. Whimper. ETA: Five weeks!

Homehunting, Day One. On Saturday we went out with our realtor, who has sold two houses for my mom in the past. I also was in Girl Scouts with her daughter about a thousand years ago. (My family has known this lady for a loooong time; this will be our third transaction with her in as many decades.) So not only am I feeling on the verge of impoverished, I'm also feeling OLD.
Fortunately, while living behind the Rusted Iron Curtain, we saved up a nice chunk of change and will have enough for a decent down payment. Nevertheless, the sticker shock of our real estate market is brutal. It's never been a particularly rational market around here: goverment offices, tech corridors, and conspicious consumption drive up prices as a matter of course. But folks around here seem to think that it's perfectly reasonable to offer a house with two bedrooms and one full bath for over 350,000 U.S. dollars. We looked at two virtually identical houses Saturday within three blocks of each other: one had a back porch in terrible condition and the other didn't have a porch at all. The first one was asking 550K, the second one wanted 580K. They'd been on the market for over 45 days. Methinks these folks are overly ambitious.
After countless hours of net-searching and a weekend in which we saw ten houses all together, we've narrowed the field to two good candidates. Both are end-unit townhouses. The less expensive one is a hop and a skip away from the church where we got married; while nearly 100,000 bucks cheaper, it would require a certain amount of redecorating (I hated the wallpaper in the foyer) which may take more time than I'll have with a baby in the house.
The more expensive one sits right on top of a light rail station and has a master bed/bath suite with a Jacuzzi tub. It has me reeling from sticker shock and covetousness. Mmmmm...Jacuzzi...

Culture shock indicator #162 since returning: I was out shopping at Target this week, and passed by a woman in the store who was drinking from a can. I did a double-take when I realized that it wasn't a can of beer. I think I spent a little too much time behind the Rusted Iron Curtain. Once, I passed a woman who was drinking a can of gin & tonic (yes, G&T in a can)...while walking her kid to school at 8 a.m. So you see why I am making a bit of an adjustment here.
Maybe I'll just stop shopping at Target altogether, it's too surreal. The last time I went to a Target before this, I passed by Tracy Ullman talking on a cellphone. That should have been my first warning.