Momentous day, little one. I'm a fanatic sometimes about those important days we live through. I think I have somewhere in this house the Washington Post A-section front page from Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election. See, it was the first time a Democrat had performed such a task since FDR. Your crazy dad drove back to Pennsylvania to vote for Clinton, after leaping through enormous hoops to vote for him in 1992. (Living in DC will make you do crazy things to maintain your personal sense of democracy.) Yeah, I have that front page, because I was driving back from Pennsylvania when the car broke down. But I didn't care because I had just found out that Clinton had won Florida, which virtually sealed the deal. I was happy as a clam. Then the timing belt broke and the car ground to a halt. Spent the rest of election night in Frederick, waiting for a ride home.

Tomorrow's paper is going to be a keeper. There is a ton of stuff that makes this world a terrible, terrible place, and people are working their damnest to move it in both directions, worse and better. The forces of good had an okay week, little one. It is at first important to mention that Dixiecrat centenarian Strom Thurmond passed away today. 100 years of living didn't make that man any nicer, and he spent much of that life fighting to keep blacks and whites separate in America. His time is passed now, and I hope it doesn't curse me to say that perhaps it's best for everyone involved.

Now on the rest. Today, the Supreme Court fixed a little something in the criminal code of 13 states that made this country less balanced and less fair. The worst thing, just about, that can happen, is discrimination. It comes in all shapes and sizes, little one, and it doesn't matter who the perpetrator or the victim are, the pain is monumental. To be designated as less-than-equal is to feel the true worst a man can do to his fellow man. In this country, that treatment is supposed to be illegal. But people perpetuate it, and call it other things, and hide behind moral codes and standing traditions.

Today, the Supreme Court said no to one of those traditions, and rebuked that shoddy excuse of moral code. A tool that let certain Americans mistreat, demean and abuse gay people just because they were gay was taken away. The excuses for this treatment -- excuses for discrimination -- were revealed as straw men, meaningless arguments. The member of the Supreme Court who led the charge is named Anthony Kennedy, and his brave stand today will make the world a place where I am slightly -- only slightly, sadly -- less concerned about introducing you soon.

Percolate on that young one. And wait till I fill you in on the visit from the Egyptians! Come soon.

I'm sitting on the front porch of our house, and summer makes good on a long spring of threats interspersed with rain. It's eighty-something today, and it will be ninety tomorrow. Your mom has enjoyed a temperate but soggy spring, and now she will begin what we forecasted would be the hardest part of the gestation of you, little one. The final days of pregnancy, and the first hot hot days of summer.

But right now, I'm on the porch. The temperature is moderate, wonderfully. The birds are singing in tthe trees, and two families of birds have actually chosen to share their own expansion plans with us.

Over on the side of the house, in a junk tree on the fence, a robin couple appear to be carefully guarding a nestful of eggs. In our neighborhood, during the high winds and frequent rainstorms of April and May, many a budding bird family was found shattered on the ground. It was sad. But these birds are mighty resolute, and the robin family has established a well-defended bulkhead about four feet from where I usually keep the garbage can. Their security zone completely encompasses the gate to travel from the front to the back yard.

They have begun to aggresively defend their zone. They dive bomb people and dogs who get too close. If you even get marginally near, one robin busts out of the nest and starts flying around chirping wildly, like some kind of avian early warning system. The other then takes off for higher ground, usually a tree or one of the two houses within six feet of their next. Then they start attacking the invader with all their birdly skillks (okay, they just buzz you chirping).

Last weekend, their madness reached a fever pitch after our neighbor and I traded stories of near death experiences retrieving the trash cans for weekly pickup.

Saturday, I experimented with various anti-robin solutions. I read on the Internet about how the bird will attack the highest point on a perceived invader. I wanted to get a closer look at the next, to see if they had babies or just eggs, so I took a rake and held it above my head while cautiously approaching the next. I was severely rebuked by relentless bird-diving.

Next, I attempted to eradicate the robins with jets of water. We had recently become convinced that we were going to have a baby within minutes (this mania comes and goes), and I reasoned that I couldn't certainly have no access to a garbage can, held at bay by a pair of creatures with almond-sized brains and no neocortices to speak of. Your mother and I had read that you would burn trough 20 diapers a day for the first few days of life on this planet, principally because we wouldn't know whether you had or hadn't actually soiled a diaper, and we would be discarding dozens of embarrassingly un-soiled diapers, filling a far-off landfill with our mistakes. In any case, I couldn't have that kind of evidence sitting around, so I needed to get to the trash can, pronto.

So the hose came out and, with a broom above my head to convince the robins I was hulk-sized and a garden hose in the other, I slowly marched toward the nest. Spraying the water, aiming for the heart of the bush where I know their fortified compound rests. They immediately swarm, swooping, diving, squaking, and finally the identify me as their target.

With only a super-fast jet of water, I am the proverbial sitting goose. I am swatting at birds with the broom while taking wild shots at them with my hose. i think I take out the father with a jet of water. Now I'm running from the nest, hose spraying all over the neighborhood, broom abandoned, scared like the dickens.

Advantage robins.

Since then, we've been something of a stalemate. Like the cold war, I periodically attempt to access the trash can, move it from where I've temporarily stationed it to its rightful place forty-eight inches from the sovereign nation of robins-nest. They seem to be calmer, but then they attack me, always leaping up to the house like beduin fighters and sniping down at me from their high vantage point.

Meanwhile, in the front, here on the porch where I'm sitting, a family of finch has recently grown by about three or four. The mother was sitting on the eggs, through rain and wind and constant coming and going by K and I, and barking tirades by Dixie, never budging. Then one day she was gone, and I feared the worst. I didn't want to get too close, but I wanted to make sure something terrible hadn't happened. Then, the mother returned, and I heard a splendid chorus of tiny chirps from the babies as they demanded food. I could see, like little orange diamonds, the beaks of the baby birds, open and chirpchirpchirping.

Since the birth, I've installed the porch swing on which I sit and K and I have spruced up the area with some right-fine little pillows. We may well be in the nesting phase ourselves. The front porch has been neglected a little since we moved in in December 2001. We have finished your room, and the rest of the house has only very large projects, nothing small and piecemeal like putting pillows and driving screws on the porch. We're preparing the nest for you, little one. It seems precious to acknowledge these things, I know, but I think it's important. The house, the home, must change to take in this new little life. It's more than protecting plugs and throwing out chemicals and all the rest. It's making comfort, bringing in soft things and pleasant things and everything else.

Come soon.

Another baby class, and some news for you, little one. We're so close to this amazing transition that the tiny details are getting sharper in focus. The bag is taking shape. We're buying little necessaries for your mom, strange things I didn't even know existed, nursing accessories and strange little gizmos to do this and that.

Plus we're preparing an adorable little garment for your opening day, your debut. The showpiece is really this little hat someone made us. The hospital gives you a hat to wear in the nursery, when you're arrayed with your fellow newcomers, all frowning with scrunched up eyes and little red faces. But you will have a special hat, with your name emblazoned across the top. Yes! You will be the master of the little army of nearly-blind brand new babies, because your hat will identify you.

I am truly insane.

But this is what it's all about, in a lot of ways. Think crazy now, because reality is around the corner with a club and a can of mace.

Here's a little fantasy I had tonight during baby class. (I daydream because sometimes I feel like the nurses teach to the lowest common denominator, repeating information endlessly.)

Anyhow, it's so simple, it's almost absurd. We load up the car, your mom and I. You're having some milk or something delicious. You're still wee and tiny, I'd say maybe 4-5 months. It's cool and beautiful outside. This city's best season is fall, and it would be safe to say by the angle of the sunlight and the delicious aroma of burning leaves in this daydream that it is the perfect, meaty part of fall, right before Halloween.

We're loading up the car for a trip to a park. We've packed a little bag with clothes and food and diapers and wipes and toys and everything else you need (the bag weighs 80 pounds), and we've made a little bag for water and treats for Dixie. It's nice and early, and the big red car we bought in anticipation of your arrival is taking the load with an eager eye on the road ahead.

We click you into your seat and hit the open ribbon of asphalt. Maybe we just go to G__________ or something similarly pretty and nearby, but the daydream doesn't exactly say. I turn to gaze at you, sleeping silently in your little seat, and the next thing I knew we're there. I'm walking along with K_________ and Dixie and you're clipped into the little Baby Bjorn, breathing in the beauty and the splendor and smiling a little baby smile before anything makes a whit of sense. Maybe you're just thinking about food.

We'll try to make that daydream come true, little one. Come soon.

It's been some kind of week little one. Yesterday, the doctor told us something astounding. You're definitely coming. You're on your way. Things are dilated, percentages are effaced, and I don't know what any of it means but it all sounds like the glorious heralds of a little you coming down from the baby factory and getting set to mix it up in the little green room we've made for you. It's amazing, astounding, terrifying now, but it seems quite, quite good! We'll see the doctor again in seven days, little one, and the progress from organ to entity is busting right along!

I've been quiet for a couple days, busy with silly things. I've struggled a little with the voice for this blog, and the struggle has played out as inaction. But I'm not letting that hold me up any more.

The struggle, the division really, was whether I should write this blog no-one reads to my son, or to the mythical people who may or may not be reading it.

I've decided. The words on this page are for all to read, but the audience is one little boy, currently swimming in a solution in the belly of the woman in the other room. Welcome to Hardly Born, son.

The doubts swirl still, but I think the choice is a wise one. You're the most important item in here, the star attraction, and there is no reason for me to tell the tall people who will soon be staring in awe at your little face and toes all sorts of details, when they can hear it from us by more conventional means. As this time passes, these experiences are shared with many, but they are banked and stored on hard disks and servers for you alone little one.

I've been listening alot to the new Radiohead. It's a sad record in many ways, but I see a ton of hope in the fact that these disconnected batch of guys realize that there is an electric guitar record to make about how rough things are in the world. This is the world that, like it or now, I'm giving you, young one. I'll hang out and see if I can schmaltz it up for the next couple years, make it a little easier to get involved with, but in the end, I gotta say it's kind of a tough joint. You'll see, though, we do what we can. We try anyhow.

Panicking. That's what the last thing was really about. I don't think there is a lot of stuff that doesn't merit some degree of panic in this process.

But I think for the most part I swing back and forth between abject panic and plaintive bouts of total, bizarre calm. I think we're totally ready, with a handsome nest prepared to receive our newest addition. I see the beautiful room we’ve prepared with help, and I look at the massive pile of material goods people have bestowed upon our baby, and I think we're totally set for this next thing. Bring us the baby to set into the bassinet, lay the infant on the tiny sheets in the tiny furniture. Hand me a diaper and let me perform the first great motor challenge of parenting with aplomb.

Whatever. I'm screwed. Tonight at baby class, we saw movies about three eighties couples and their birth experiments. One couple, based in Boulder, Co, were unbelievable. There must have been some massive boom in baby-related movies in 1984, because these mustache-wearing bastards are everywhere, standing next to their big bangs and feathered sides wives, flanked by nurses in thick eyeglasses and white shoes, talking about the birth experience ad nauseum.

But the first couple went with no medicine, no nothing, just raw, unadulterated baby-having. They made funny noises, and the woman was in the most incredible and exquisite pain I have ever witnessed. I simply cannot believe the pain she was experiencing. She looked like a torture victim, like she wanted to die. The nurse who runs the class came back after we saw the film and said, 'she was in so much pain.' WHY WOULD THEY SHOW THIS TO PEOPLE?

The second couple was a professional athlete and her firefighter husband. These people had an epidural, which caused a warm grin to creep across the faces of everyone in the room, men and women. Sweet dark elixir, flowing right into the spinal column, numbing all the pain. Yes. This taut and toned athlete shot out a baby and looked like she could ride her professional cycle all the way back to Rochester, or wherever they were from.

Finally, the c-section movie was distressing, because it looked fake. They cut right into lady and got out a baby. The doctors were rough and brusque, because they were seventies doctors operating on another eighties lady (poofy hair, loose turtleneck sweater, husband who looked like my uncle Ken and didn't say 4 words). They made three incisions, whipped out a baby, poked it in the face a half-dozen times with a tiny turkey baster and then tossed it over to a nurse to bat cleanup. Took forty-five minutes, they said, and the lady only had to recover for three days while taking care of her new baby and her toddler. Where’s that quiet-uncle looking bastard? Probably out getting discount smokes at the Stop-n-Go.

I believe we'll probably have a lot of pain, and I know nobody looks like a million bucks having a baby. I don't mean at all to diminish the value of the experiences relayed in these movies. I think the intent of the movie is to prepare you for something for which there is no preparation. Nobody can tell you how this will feel until you feel it. It won't look like this, because these three ladies had three different births, and you will have yet a forth, and ours will be a fifth, unlike those others. Maybe K will yell, maybe I will eat a sandwich. (The nurses keep insisting the coaches bring a sandwich, so we don't pass out, hit our heads, get sent to the ER and miss everything. Can’t I get an IV?) Maybe the baby will be born in two hours, maybe in 20. The only thing we'll know for sure is that a lady and I will enter the hospital with a big belly and an unused carseat, and when we leave, we won't have either.

When I was a kid, our extended families were all more like siblings to us. My mom's family was all over the town we grew up in, and that meant four cousins in spitting distance, plus a very young uncle who served as a big brother/bad example for myself and the other cousin in my age group. This was the family makeup: Myself and two sisters younger by two and four years. My mom's sister, who is insane, had three children as well, and they essentially matched the ages of my sisters and myself. Another sister of my mom's had a child about in the age category of the youngest of these two trios. The young uncle was about five years older than me and three older than the other oldest cousin.

Every family gathering was a reunion of this octet. We played stupid games, pretended to be detectives and airplane pilots, watched each other suffer indignities and learn to swear, smoke and grow apart.

But at the time, we were inseparable. My very idea of paradise from childhood was staying over at my cousin's for a night or two during the weekend. They lived in different houses, but the one I remember was a sprawling monstrosity built into the length of a hill alongside a massive sideyard, anchored at its base by a massive toby tree. The yard must have been two hundred feet but it felt like a square mile. I learned to fake fall from a fake gunshot running up and down that hill. I played made up tag-type games with sticks and floating homebases in that yard, running, screaming, laughing and exploring. A few hundred paces from the house, a skuzzy creek passed which seemed like the most amazing place for a ten-year-old to visit, under a railroad overpass and littered with pig-iron that looked like overgrown buckshot. Clamber down the rocks and you could see the swamp rat that lived under the overpass, where the yellow-brown water passed through a beaver-looking den that I think was probably just a pile of trash and storm run-off.

The house had an incredible smell. Three stories and all of them gamy from three kids, a mom and a dad (!). The dad was still a foreign concept to me, since my memory of life with a father in the house was at the time filed under distant dreams and lost pasts. But this particular father (my aunt and uncle are now divorced, and I have no idea where the uncle is; the aunt, who is insane, has become addicted to barely-medically necessary weight-loss and plastic surgery, and has alarming orange hair) wasn't really there. I don't even remember him in their other houses, the funny one with the doorway twenty feet below the street, or the creepy pre-fab number on the hill overlooking town.

The point of all this digression is that I've got a little child brewing in my wife's belly, and I don't have any cousins for him. I don't have a fantastical place to visit, where I can ignore the sadness because I was having such a great time. I don't know whether children today even have this life. Who do kids ride bikes with today? Whose house are they dying to stay overnight at?

I know I'm panicking, but this is what I'm good for, I've been told. Panicking and reaching high things in our house. This baby is going to be here in a month or so. Tonight I felt him pushing on K's stomach and I pushed him back. He responded with another poke, and I realized I was communicating with this little creature who will make demands on me like nothing in the world. I'm not ready, not without some serious help. I spent three weeks drilling four holes in a wall, for god's sake. I spent twenty minutes looking for two screws I had carefully placed in my own pocket while building some insane baby furniture Sunday. I can't do this alone.

Where are my cousins? Where is the support universe that holds young Americans in careful moderation, ensuring that they don't fall too far, don't make bad decisions, do have somewhere for their kids to spend the night? K and I have friends in this city; we've lived here for more than a decade. But I don't see that house, those kids. K's family served as a landing pad for a lot of kids who had problems and whatnot while she was growing up. In the south, a lot of the things you didn't talk about got taken care of when the nice family down the street let you stay for dinner, and sit in on their family gatherings and pool parties. In my life, through a divorce and much more, the living we kids did as a group allowed us to become the unique and complex adults we are. We grew apart, but our bond will always be that we were raised like a pack, like a brood.

Are there broods our kid can join in a couple years?

Thoughts on the pending family:

We recently got together with K's cousin and her husband. They have a little one, about three years old, I think. K's aunt and uncle were in town visiting this family, who live about twenty minutes away. And I realized that we hadn't seen them since the last time the aunt and uncle visited, maybe eight or ten months ago. Before that it had been more than a year.

And I'm worried about the implications of this distance. K and I are not big visitors, big phoners, big emailers. We schedule ourselves and work ourselves in such a way that these tasks, the fundamentals of human contact, seem like work once we're done with everything else we've agreed to do. We come home in the evenings, and we relish the very idea of not sitting on the phone for an hour with people. My sister has lived in two houses in a city three and a half hours away over the last two years; I haven't seen a either of them.

We don't self-motivate, and this is terrible. But we're exhausted, we say, and it's true. We've got this obligation and that, this mandatory trip to my mom's house and then this mandatory visit from another parent. This past weekend, we didn't do anything to write home about. We grabbed dinner with a friend (though I admit to holding out for them to come to our neck of the woods instead of vice versa), ran around buying and returning baby loot and then stayed in our pajamas all day working on the baby's room and the house in general on Sunday. It's Monday night and I've said more than once in response to a question about my weekend, "it was the best weekend we've had in a long time." I guess all that will end when the kid comes, right?

I'm sure it won't. It won't end, but it will change. The endless obligations will continue, but they will revolve around this little, helpless creature. This wonderful, odd-smelling little bundle of joy will enter our lives and reset the priorities on a massive scale. A new sun will enter our universe and we'll begin the orbit that will dominate our lives.

The world is full of horrifying things, child. Sometimes, you just have to turn your head. Tonight, I will not discuss the imminent threat to my child's rights and freedoms presented by Attorney General John Ashcroft. I will not talk tonight about the fact that I, as an Arab-American, have misgivings about letting my child take my last name, because an an Arab name can be a devastating liability in America today. We won't discuss here the fears and the hopes that mix like cream in coffee as I try to sort out all the feelings I entertain when I think about the child K and I will be bringing into the world.

Tonight, I will talk about thank you notes. Sitting quietly, K and I wrote notes to family members, some crazy and some not, for the things they sent. These people are all family, and anything said about them is to be taken with the regular grain of salt that family comments should automatically elicit. You know the saying: you can pick your friends...

So as we wrote kind words, K and I made snide comments. It's what we do to survive. "Dear Louise: Thank you for the strange brown thing that may or may not be related to diaper changing. It is a shame it smells like cheap blended whiskey and feet." "Holdman Family: Your strange beige blanket/towel item and the mysterious (possibly pagan?) verse you included in your card remain an absolutely baffling enigma to us both. I hope you're well, and that your 1973 Plymouth Fury made it back to that god-forsaken hamlet you call home."

Just for posterity, I'm going to mention next that an interesting item was brought to our attention in baby class the other night. One potential symptom of pending labor is a sudden drop in appetite. So I'm just going to put it out there that, for the last few days, a full forty days before the due date, K is experiencing a surprising drop in desire to eat. I'm just saying, if anybody checks later, I wrote it down here.

More soon, but not too soon, I hope.

Tonight we sorted through the loot. We've received an enormous amount of gifts from friends and family. The first shower feels like months ago, I guess it was the first week in April. Then my mom had a shower last weekend, and my office threw us a little something today. Katrena's office also had a nice event for her, where we received some serious booty. This kid is winning left and right.

Anyhow, we stood in this little room, with consumer items stacked all around us like riches in a treasure room, except everything is gentle tones of green and blue, and decorated with ducks or frogs. With two of us (and Dixie, of course) standing in here, and the changing table extended (as it will be permanently until the baby is, like, 11), and the bassinet still in the room (it will be exported to our bedroom at some point), and the enormous boxed goods (pack-n-play, carseat, stroller, carseat base, swing, bouncer), we had approximately three square feet to maneuver in. I am going to be able to stand in one place, like an astronaut in a cockpit, pivoting left and right and reaching any point from one wall to the opposite, effortlessly. If I installed a swivel stool (a task chair, really), we could sit in it, raise and lower it depending on the task at hand, and do everything we need. I could temporarily bolt it to the ground, and it wouldn't present any hazard.

I am crazy.

But we sorted through the clothing, of which we received bushelsful. This kid is going to be handsomely outfitted, like a hipster king. He has Hawaiian print shirts. He has bad-ass Swedish t-shirts. He has a pair of distressed denim Old Navy overalls. HE ISN'T BORN YET!

One last note on my insanity: We received clothing for babies from birth through 18 months. It made the most sense to me to organize this clothing in a basket by size, like items in a file drawer. At the front, the 0-3 month stuff. As you scroll back, the clothing gets bigger. How do I think this is some kind of effective system? I don't know. It just seemed like something that should be done.

Baby class again last night. I have a strong belief that we’re going to have this baby early. I don’t have any definitive evidence to support this. I am reading deeply into hunches and clues that I absorb despite everyone telling me that every pregnancy is different. I feel like the baby turned round and was ready to go sooner than anyone said he would. I feel like K is carrying lower, as if the baby is in position for the next step. I am clearly mad.

But the baby’s room is close to done. There was another shower this weekend, and the little guy made out like a bandit. He was showered with goods. K and I were opening gifts for about an hour. The kindness and pleasantness of the event were matched only with the unbridled torrent of advice everyone heaped on us. One crazy relative kept citing her boys as an example of success in the child-rearing department. I have never, ever liked those kids. I listened carefully if only to ensure that her lessons are avoided like poison ivy in our home.

Eventually, I got the changing table mounted. The piece I was writing, part of which appears here, became like the table itself, insurmountable. I went through dozens of separate pieces of apparatus, eventually drilling new holes in the wall and the back of the changing table. I learned what toggle bolts do and don’t accomplish, and I swore a blue streak, cursing everyone who had let me get to nearly 30 years old without even a tiny rime of technical know-how in the home repair department. I cursed the woodshop teacher who could have taught me one goddamn thing about drywall instead of convincing me of the utility of that stupid wooden paddle for handling oven racks. Yeah, the room was duly anointed with the swearing of an idiot with a drill.

But now the room is chock full of product. The late date of the shower last weekend created a nightmare scenario for K, who wanted to have much more settled with the baby’s room long ago, as is her wont. As she does when she’s concerned that some progress or event won’t occur, she tells me over and over, as casual as can be, about how we are going to do something with that room now that we’ve got all the stuff and all the showers are out of the way. It’s like the reminder on Outlook gone terribly awry.

One thing in the baby class frightened me. I hadn’t really thought about the baby coming any time but on a weekend when Katrena and I were just sitting around the house waiting for the baby to come. But in listening to the nurse tonight, I was struck eye-opened by the fact that we could be anywhere at any time and this kid could pop the bag o’ waters and head for the light. We could be in the Target, or in the line at the Peruvian chicken place. Nowhere is safe.

42 days to go.

I can tell you that one of the main things I have learned from this pregnancy is that I am not a carpenter, woodworker or even mildly skilled home repair specialist. In fact, I have learned that I am an insanely unskilled practitioner of the at-home arts. I hope to illustrate this with some electronic pictures, though the Blogspot interface doesn’t make it easy.

Anyhow, there was some building and some painting, and some home construction undertaken by the baby’s grandfather, my wife’s dad. He’s the kind of guy who will drive 650 miles with two sawhorses and some serious ear protectors to build strange things on demand for his pregnant daughter. Thank goodness for that.

So Mr. and Mrs. H. came up, and brought their dog and some paint and a sewing machine (we are talking serious grandparents, people) and set to working like the little elves making shoes in the Grimm fairy tale. I went to work, and each day the house looked different. Fully painted one day, sporting a handsomely stenciled alphabet the next, and including a handsome radiator cover the third, the room was really humming along in the hands of the baby’s southern grandparents.

Mr. H. even built the baby’s crib, a high-end Swedish model whose bars are admirably close together (considering my level of paranoia, which involved me initially advocating for a Skinner box type contraption). Although I initially pouted about being left out of all the home renovations and construction, I didn’t realize what awaited. I was a fool.

Mr. and Mrs. H left and we undertook to build the accompanying Swedish baby changing table/shelf/chest of drawers. This came along fine, following as we did the rudimentary instruction sheet. The pictures of super-hero like hex screws flying into their appropriate pre-drilled holes and cute little nail-men being happily driven into their marked target pieces with a fantastic starburst from a hammer guided us along like lambs to slaughter.

Then, to paraphrase Arlo, on the last page, on the back of the page, in the middle of the page, away from everything else on the page, underlined, quotated, in parentheses, was the following warning, in a host of languages:

CAUTION: Changing table must be completely and firmly anchored to the wall to prevent falling or other dangerous consequences.

This was my greatest challenge, my Waterloo.

Weeks went my and I avoided dealing with the mounting. I knew I would have to at some point, but the fear in me was too great. I somehow developed the belief that I would need amazingly powerful screws and drill bits to penetrate the wall behind the baby’s changing table. I believe I came to this assumption knowing absolutely nothing about the actual composition of the wall, and not bothering to physically check the wall, conveniently located ten feet from my bedroom and five inches from my bathroom.

One late night at a Lowe’s, I bought a drill bit and some screws that were bright blue and would drill directly into masonry.

I got home, and then noticed that the baby’s changing table stood inches from the wall. Our house is old — coming up on 82 years — and the room in question has a baseboard, and then a little wedge molding in front of that. The changing table has no cutout to accommodate such quaint little floor stylings, and as a result, the two and three quarter inch screws wouldn’t reach the wall. Also, it turns out the wall was just made of plaster. The screws would be useless anyhow. Designed to eat into masonry, they destroyed plaster like the Death Star.

Next was a high-tech Swedish mounting system designed to effortless support 75 pounds per cubic foot of pressure. No child could possibly rip four of these suckers out of the wall in the usage of the changing table unless one of us got up there with him. I could nearly taste victory.

The weird Swedish locking mechanism that the screws used needed to work with the mounting target flush against the wall. I needed to improvise. Picture then, if you will, a big man in a t-shirt and sleeping pants from the Target (I do my best work lightly clothed) on my front porch in sandals, attempting to cut some scrap wood left over from one of Mr. H’s projects into one-inch lengths designed to close the gap between the changing table and the wall.

Then picture how much easier it would have been had I drilled holes through those one-inch segments of wood first. But no, I cut one by one cubes on my porch and then DRILLED HALF INCH HOLES THROUGH THE CUBES HOLDING THEM IN MY BARE HANDS. I am such an idiot.

Needless to say, the one inch extenders didn’t work, as I knew they wouldn’t. I was holding a cube in one hand and a drill in the other, praying nobody from Children and Family services wandered by, and saying to myself, ‘this will never work.’

(More on this adventure tomorrow.)