I had wanted to tell you some of this last week, on our anniversary, but what I wrote that night ended up being for your mom, and not for public consumption, really.

Katrena and I met in a residence hall at the American University in late August of 1992. We were neighbors in the dorm. I was loud, and we weren’t exactly best friends, which led to us sort of wondering off into our own friends and circles, though generally aware of each other throughout Katrena’s first three years at University.

Finally, at the end of her third year, and in the waning days of my four years there, we decided maybe to try to get together.

How it happened is this: Needless to say, I have confessed a lingering affection for Katrena since about the first time I met her. I was in relationships and so was she, so nothing really happened. But during the final semester of my senior year, we ended up living once again in the same building. I was finally free of several things: I was free of a relationship that had hung around like a bad cold for months after we both realized it was long-dead; I was free of a position at the school newspaper that paralyzed my weekends; I had even quit my crappy job at Starbucks, choosing to tighten the belt for the final few months until graduation. I was a man released blinking into the light, wondering what was next.

Katrena and I had been flirty for months, but she was still in a relationship, one that had lasted a long time. It may have been similarly ailing like my own; it’s not mine to say. But Katrena and I were spending more time together, enjoying long laugh-filled afternoons at one another’s job (we both had dorm-based jobs), and phoning a good deal.

Just prior to the final spring break of my college career (which I spent visiting my mom and picking up a used car in Altoona, Pennsylvania from my dad), I clumsily tried to engineer a night out with Katrena by including her in a group invite that ended up featuring us and one other person. The other invitee was a ringer from my camp, who was supposed to peel off at some point during the evening. This is one of Katrena’s favorite stories. The ringer was underage (as was Katrena and myself, though the ringer drew the card) and we weren’t served alcohol. Full on nachos and coke, we went home, with my plan in tatters.

The next morning, I delivered Katrena to the airport to visit her then-boyfriend. I was disheartened. I picked up my used car, and resolved to not worry about Katrena when I got back to school. After all, the boyfriend was coming to join her for a week at the dorm, from whatever the hell it was he was doing at the time.

During that week, Katrena and I frequently discussed how problematic it was that he was staying with her. It was a tacit acknowledgement that there was something pressing in our ‘friendship’ that she certainly didn’t want to display or explain to her boyfriend.

I was perfectly happy with this development. In life, I have to confess that I enjoy when something is totally out of my hands. I certainly couldn’t do anything to move the issue, as the man was in her dorm room. I was on a roller coaster, and I was waiting to see what the next turn brought. There wasn’t some question of my fighting for her, because she didn’t want to be fought for. She wanted him to leave, it became apparent by midweek, and so did I.

He did. And then one night, Katrena went out with Steve for drinks after Steve (who was graduating) had received the distressing news that he was going to have to get a non-dorm job for his first summer in the real world). When she got back, she confessed to being tired and worried that she might be too sleepy to complete her shift at the dorm job. It went without saying that I would stay up with her. And I made her a pot of coffee to stick out the evening. And as I prepared the coffee down and later when I brought it to the front desk to start her shift with her, Katrena and I kissed for the first time.

I didn’t really ask about the boyfriend. Perhaps I was enjoying the strange thrill of being the other man, though I doubt it. I think I was enjoying the wonderful feeling of being any man in Katrena’s life. That night was late April 3, 1995. We have since resolved that we actually kissed in the wee hours of the fourth of April. And with a few additional chapters, that’s how we ended up with the little smiling baby we are awaiting now with baited, matched breaths.

Sorry I've been out of touch. Work is work, and sometimes it takes more of our lives than it should. I'm also just getting the hang of the life-in-two-blogs concept. The Liquid List, where I vent and spew about matters political and somtimes musical, is something I can toss a quick bone to during the day, or lay in a monstrous clip about everything wrong with America and the world. In this forum, though, I'm interested in trying to talk about the countdown to our baby's premiere here. And what other planets will be competing for light and warmth from his fair, fair coming.

Last night, of course, was the anniversary of his parent's wedding. K and I have been married for four years and one day, as of right now. Four years ago this time, we were groggily opening gifts among grandparents and our panicked little dog, who was jittery in anticipation of being left for a month while we honeymooned and returned home.

Celebrating our anniversary has been at times romantic and quaint. K travels somewhat for work, and there is a little set of memories of events packed in, postponed or pre-empted because of her schedule of trips. Once we did an entire Valentine's dinner -- complete with molten chocolate cake -- all before 7 so Katrena could go to bed and wake up for some crazy 4 am flight to Eastern Europe. Last night we joked that romance would be on the backburner, since K's got the beachball under her shirt, and romance is what got us into this in the first place.

But we had a nice dinner, and aggressively co-attacked a dessert, toasting with strawberry-laden forks instead of champagne or even wine. And then I went home and finished some work on the baby's room, where the furniture is now fully functional.

The story of the furniture assembly -- a long, multi-entry nightmare unto itself -- will be told in this forum, soon.

The other day, Katrena was featured in an item by a local Washington Post columnist named Bob Levey. Levey is that indigenous to all newsrooms creature who has been in the town or city for more than twenty years, writing about the little things that, sewn together, form life in that very municipality. Levey writes about red light runners and people who eat on the Metro, and he hosts a monthly contest for neologisms to meet the needs of life today. His column appears on the comics page.

In the item, Katrena was profiled because she has developed a plan for responding to unwanted pregnant belly touching by strangers. She rubs them back. You can read the entire column here, but I've included the bonus bits below:

Katrena Henderson would probably scoff if you accused her of being Wonder Woman.

She is seven months pregnant and, by her own account, "a bit big for my stage in this process." She's hardly in shape to leap tall buildings in a single bound, or to borrow trouble.

But trouble seems to be borrowing her. She says that spring 2003 has brought an epidemic of belly-rubbers.

These are busybodies of both sexes who spy the bowling ball in Katrena's midsection and think that they have a right to pat it.

Without asking.

In public.

Even though they are total strangers.

Katrena is totally outraged, of course. But the way she gets even is positively ingenious.

She rubs back.

Go ahead and lecture Katrena about two wrongs and how seldom they make a right. Tell her that a counter-assault is still an assault. Point out that rubbing the belly of a man who outweighs you by 100 pounds might be hazardous to your health. Or might be taken as a sign of amorous intent.

Katrena doesn't care, because she has the satisfaction of seeing the look on the person's face. You might describe it as shock and awe.

Following this appearance in the newspaper, I decided to send the article out to all parties, trumpeting the appearance of my lovely wife and unborn child in the pages of the Washington Post.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to tell some of the people I sent it out to that we were pregnant. They found out from Bob Levey. One such respondent was my best friend from high school, Sarita. Below is my explanatory letter, which, I confess, as I wrote I thought about putting much of this info here. So I have, so I have.

Yes, we're quite pregnant. I don't know the protocol for all of this, and as a result, you aren't the only person who only found out about the impending baby through the Bob Levey column of last week. You don't send announcements out until the baby is born, so you have to rely on all sorts of self-conscious horn-tooting. It seems odd, so I didn't do a very good job of it.

Nevertheless, the baby is due on July 15th, and though I have a suspicion he will come earlier than that, the doctor will neither confirm nor deny by hypothesis. We're apparently just about right for the 30th-31st week, and that's allright with the doctor. We found out we are having a boy, and I think we're going to name him Reid Tarek Henderson Rizk. I'm not absolutely certain of any of that. He could be called Gerald for all I know. And he could be a she, because everything is taken on faith in this situation. Everything.

Just like your family, I'm sure, you guys don't know what's going to happen next. It just will.

But we're making plans and preparations, which include me apparently proving to anyone interested in hearing that my capacity to perform odd carpentry and electrical work is remarkably limited. I've drilled nickel-sized holes into eighty-year old plaster. The octegenarian building materials shattered like a slo-mo scene from a movie, and no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't stop the drill fast enough. I just hope my child doesn't mind a couple of spackle spots on the walls.

We bought a station wagon, remarking last summer that just taking the two of us and our cocker spaniel to the beach for a week taxed our reliable Honda Civic to its outer limits. Subaru Forester, meet the family. Other than that, we're just kind of proceeding as grown-up people do. Refinancing mortgages, buying fewer records (though try to find the EP that came with Stephen Malkmus' Pig Lib CD), mowing lawns, wondering how we're going to keep the changing table from pulling down the whole damn wall, etc.

But here's a funny story: Katrena and I were very busy this fall. I did some field work during the elections in Houston, which is a terrible city. K had to travel twice to India, once to Hyderabad and once to Mumbai. Somewhere in there (we're not even sure) we managed to make this baby. Katrena went to the doctor, and they lost the labs for a day, so we didn't find out until she was already in India the second time. The doctor called me, I waited until she woke up in Hyderabad and I was ready to go to sleep in Arlington, and I called and told her.

Although Katrena hasn't been able to eat any curry since she got back from India, hopefully the baby will have a taste for Samosas, because his dad loves them.

Okay, I'm going to go up and read some Shel Silverstein to the baby in my wife's belly, because I hear that Katrena is already reading "Green Eggs and Ham."

Just a little bit of housekeeping: if you want to see the baby's room, click here. This is a little page I built on our weird free Comcast pages, so don't think that there's going to be a lot of content over there. I don't know if I can upload pictures on the Blogspot-hosted blogs (the other blog I work on is hosted elsewhere), but if I find I can, I will probably put some tasteful images of mother, father and baby. In the meantime, you can enjoy those pictures above, and I'll see about getting a sneak preview.

Things are getting a little tougher around here. Katrena is a petite lady, and she is carrying around what looks to be an enormous baby. We're still about two months from the due date, and regular activity is already an effort for her. As everyone knows, you get tired more quickly, and your body is simply not behaving in any was you could ever imagine. There is a medicine ball suspended from the front of her, and the little man inside of it is kicking to get out all the damn time.

So if Katrena lies down, she's down there for good. She needs help getting up, sitting forward, leaning over, anything. The amazing thing is, she is petite and still pretty small from all directions but the baby-view. From behind, you can still only barely tell she's pregnant.

Tonight she was sitting on the couch, grimacing. The baby was going to town in there, she said, kicking away. She wanted me to come and feel it. I didn't need to go over there, though, because I could see the impact from across the room. Her belly was reverberating like a bass drum. The kid was hammering away, and you could see he wasn't sparing the lash.

The worst thing, of course, is the helplessness. Not only can I not help in any way, but there isn't anything Katrena can do. She looks at me with a sad expression on her face. I bring her ice cream. What else can we do?

Tonight we went to our first new baby class.

I have an array of responses to this event. They range from the absurdist to the unsettling.

First, we somehow managed to enter in the middle of the course of study. Everyone else has been through four classes or so, and they know each other. They have binders that weren’t available to us, and they have, most devastatingly, rapport with the RN who ran the class with some other lady whose credentials remain unestablished.

In this situation, it is hard, but not impossible for me to avoid attempting to rush into a rapport-establishing mode. I am like an alcoholic when this happens, except with, um, rapport.

So I struggled with this, in deference to my wife, who hates that I am constantly striving to connect by chatting with strangers, identifying commonalities, chiming in with information. Try having a conversation near me on a bus and mentioning you’re from my hometown of Pittsburgh. I didn’t like living there that much, and I rarely go back, but if I hear you say the magic P-word, I can barely contain myself.

Tonight, though, it was different. I scarcely spoke out in the class seeking to lock down a healthy dose of rapport once. I didn’t make a particularly funny remark when fake poop was discovered in the diapers we were changing on the fake babies (though a perfect one appeared before my eyes, dancing like the directions to nirvana). I didn’t chat with the other parents to be, I didn’t ask the RN an unnecessary question just to have a conversation.

We learned about bathing the babies, and I made snarky comments to Katrena (which are still acceptable, apparently) and I demonstrated my adroitness with the burrito-roll method of baby swaddling as well as diaper application. The baby didn’t get water in its little plastic eyes once.

Of course, there was a short video at the beginning. We watched it in an early-eighties auditorium that reminded me of my junior high school auditorium, in that it had only hosted criminally lame receptions where employees of the month are lauded by a hospital administrator who wouldn’t know this employee if she bit him on the tit. The television was an early eighties rear-projection model that couldn’t show our video without bringing along the constant tinny wheedling noise of the NBA playoff game whose signal bled over from its tune-channel.

And the video starred Pam Dawber, Mindy, of “Mork and Mindy.” This was inevitable. I may as well have been in an episode of the Simpsons watching Troy McClure (from such films as “The Leper in the Backfield) run down information about our new baby.

Pam was wearing a flowing mint green dress with a matching belt. She could have had boots on, but I couldn’t tell when she walked from early-eighties fireplace to early-eighties couch where early-eighties couple was watching their beautiful baby coo.

When I saw all the babies, though, I was admittedly smiling like a buffoon at the prospect of having one of our own. Katrena began crying immediately. I tried to say that I hope our baby is that happy with its early-eighties family, but I couldn’t get the words out without laughing. Nobody bothered staring at me because they were still annoyed from a few minutes earlier, when I removed a legal pad from my bag to take notes during this riotous movie. Even Katrena stared at me when I whipped out the yellow signature of note-taking. So nobody bothered craning their necks when I made a snorting noise after a particularly amusing montage of early-eighties fathers, all with moustaches and indoor-tint glasses, googling at their babies or taking sage direction from their eighties pediatricians.

Five more Tuesdays.

At night sometimes I read to the baby in her belly. Sometimes Katrena is awake, and sometimes she isn’t. But I will read the baby Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” and funny kid poems from “Where the Sidewalk Ends” over and over again.

I’ve always been a reader. I used to consume books like mad, which was strange because I didn’t actually read fast. But I was a voracious reader, nonetheless, and in this house right now, I’m reading at least two or three anthologies or books that I can pick up and read after months of separation. I just pull one down from the shelf, look for the bookmark and read away. I was previously obsessed with finishing any book started, no matter how unimportant or unenjoyable. But life is not for reading books you don’t like.

Anyhow, I remember reading Green Eggs and Ham as a kid. It was the first book of my own I can remember reading. I read it over and over, and I remember that the binding broke and splintered, with the glue and cover revealing its three puny signatures and the pages starting to hang out of the book, like they were struggling to reorganize into a different story.

Recently, I read about how Ted Geisel wrote the first Dr. Seuss book. Apparently, he made a deal with some publisher to write a book using about 200 words that all kids should know that wouldn’t suck like the Dick and Jane books did. The publisher didn’t think it was possible, and Geisel wrote “The Cat in the Hat,” and that was pretty much it.

So when I was a kid, somebody read it too me, though I can’t honestly tell you which parent. I mean, I assume it was my mom, because my dad’s not a reader, but I’m pretty sure it was just me, learning to read.

I’m happy to be reading to the baby before it comes out and greets the world. I think it is something I can establish with this little man so he won’t forget who read to him first.

At times, we feel like the baby isn't anywhere near here yet, and other times, it feels like the impending birth is rushing towards us like ground in a freefall. Moments when you feel like you're losing you breath (because you've got to get a lady to watch the baby, and you've got to make all this room in your life, and you've got to bolt that piece of furniture to the wall, and what about that mattress pad, is it too thick) are matched by moments when you think you've got plenty of time. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

I was thinking that it might be nice to write down some thoughts as we get close to the baby's birth. Once the little man is here, I'm sure I will have good intentions, but we'll see exactly how much blogging I do when there is a little person depending on my wife and me for every...single...aspect...of..its...existence.