The sound of one hand counting?

(Today's title was between that and "V: The Series". Too obscure?)

We're now at 5 days and change from our due date!

Throughout this experience, we've gotten weekly e-mails from our hospital talking about the baby's development, common pregnancy and child care questions, and so on. Meh aptly noticed that while in the first 38 weeks, these were always paired with peppy comments like "it won't be much time now!", the last few are more measured with "it could still be a little while" and "the due date is just a midpoint of a range, can be miscalculated, and you just need to chill". Suffice it to say, we're excited - never actually "ready" really, but definitely eager to meet our baby!

This morning, we took both cars to get our car seat and two bases inspected, and to make sure we'd actually installed them correctly. (Incidentally, it's great that so many agencies offer this service on a free/volunteer basis.) The instruction manuals all around are horrendously vague - the car seat company makes sure to say the bare minimum about how to attach it to the seat belt, and the car manual won't make any comments about how to attach the belt/LATCH to the car seat. Mmmm, litigation protection...

Is it weird that I was somewhat impressed that all modern car seats actually have a hidden (well, to non-parents/parents-to-be at any rate) "easter egg" automatic locking mode to assist with car seat installations? Beats the scary locking clips folks used to have to deal with. Anyway, that's just a random musing...

LATCH [Lower Anchors and Tethers for CHildren - stealing the CH from one word seems like cheating, but anyway...] sounds like a cool idea, even if it's just a glorified pair of in-car metal anchors that car seats can conveniently hook to. But it's kind of weird that in smaller vehicles (the Prius isn't exactly a compact, so I guess "smaller" apparently denotes cars with less volume than, say, a Hummer), LATCH is only offered for the left and right seats -- and those seats aren't recommended as highly as the center since curtain airbags still deploy there. So we've got unused LATCHes and are using the center seat belt instead. Go figure.

Anyway, luckily I'd gotten it mostly correct, and the nice woman at AAA walked us through the minor corrections and things to watch out for over time, as well as the completely separate set of instructions for harness tightening, adjusting, and releasing. I'm starting to understand why so many of our friends have pictures of their baby's first experience in a car seat - it's looking like a true feat of mental strength to get everything buckled correctly that first time! So now we've got car seat bases in both cars and at least one basic post-hospital need is met.

How many more things have we completely overlooked? That's not an entirely rhetorical question; I'm turning anonymous commenting on, so folks without Blogspot accounts can still leave us notes, feedback, questions, or better observations than we clueless parents-to-be can. Hope to hear from you!