Shaken, not stirred

We ended up staying very busy over Meh's four day weekend, meeting up with friends, welcoming a family's new addition, shopping, and wrapping things up with an unexpected, harrowing, and thoroughly unnerving escape.

First, the happy activities! Friends J and S invited us to share a tasty Saturday morning brunch at a little cafe we'd never been to before, where the food is always "on fresh" according to the sign outside. English may not be the proprietor's first language, but the food (and fresh squeezed OJ) was plentiful and excellent. Zachary was looking around with his big blue eyes and smiling at everyone.

Next we stopped by a local synagogue to congratulate friends M and A on their new daughter S. (They had a baby naming ceremony at services; though we arrived after services had completed, I still felt a little sheepish showing up in jeans. Hopefully Zachary deflected the attention of any fashionistas who might've been in attendance.) S is super tiny, with her head easily fitting in a grown-up's palm. Meh and I were having a hard time remembering that at some point, Zachary had been even smaller! Anyway, after an afternoon at home, we headed back out in the early evening to meet up with friends M and K for dinner at a tasty vegetarian thai restaurant, followed up of course by a trip to the nearby legendary Trophy Cupcakes. A very full day for the little man!

Today started off somewhat more leisurely, with a return to that outlet mall we'd taken Zachary to back in the days of his earliest happy baby bjorn experiences. He was again mostly happy and talkative, which made me immediately suspicious that he was covering for a nasty diaper. Sure enough, when we stopped in a family-friendly restroom, it was blowout city. No worries - a change of clothes later, we were back in the shopping mood. All three of us got things -- Zachary supplemented his collection of hedgehog-themed wear with a cute new hat, socks, and onesie.

Exhausted from a day of shopping, we headed home. And here's where things went surreally wrong: once we got off the freeway, we were driving down the 5-lane street heading towards our house. We approached a major intersection and the light was green - but a pedestrian was darting across the street on the far side of the intersection. Okay, so I slowed down to let him cross. He then followed an aberrant path right towards our car with a wild-eyed menacing look on his face. Before I knew what had happened, he'd reached the car, slammed his fists down on the front hood, and then came bounding around to the driver's side door. It was when he pulled it halfway open (why wasn't it locked?) that I grabbed onto the door handle and just gunned it through the intersection (don't worry, the light was still green). Well, "gunning it" in a hybrid doesn't exactly involve peeling out or anything, but you get the gist. Meh and I were both quite shaken up (Zachary was thankfully blissfully asleep through the whole experience).

And while there are of course disturbed violent people in any city (or really anywhere), here was the true Seattle moment: at the next red traffic light (maybe 10 minutes later), a guy who'd witnessed the event pulled up next to us to make sure that we were okay, and we had a nice car-to-car conversation that helped calm us down.

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!

Pimp Meh's Ride

An apparently favorite pasttime of Prius owners is looking for ways to get even better gas mileage (hm, definitely feels like a variant of the "smug" concerns so brilliantly displayed on "South Park" a few seasons ago). There's the 'electric mode' button (found on European and Japanese cars, but interestingly not available in the US short of wiring hacks), which bypasses the gas engine entirely - but only for speeds under 35 mph. There are crazy analyses of exotic driving styles (and slightly more common-sense driving techniques), including discussions of if/when to use the mysterious 'B' driving mode. Other folks focus on turning the Prius into a plug-in hybrid (PHEV), where you can use the power grid to drive your first x miles of the day (and if x is less than your roundtrip commute, gas-free). And of course throughout it all, everyone is trying to find more powerful battery supplement/replacement options.

The principal problem with most of these (short of having to tear apart your car and potentially voiding parts of its warranty) is the crazy expense; plug-in solutions look to be $10K and up. But it's still fun to read and see nutty pictures of folks doing everything short of mounting a flux capacitor and electric hook system to their cars. (Hmm, now that I mention it, that's not a half bad idea... And apparently you can even order Flux Capacitors and Hover Conversions at DeLorean's website.)

My personal favorite is someone who figured out how to use their Prius as a backup home generator - we definitely could've used that when we lost power for 10+ days in this past winter's wind storm.

The only 'free' hack I've seen is to turn off the audible beeping noise (heard only inside the car) when in reverse. The directions sound like something out of a video game cheats website; I'm half expecting to have to plug an Xbox controller in somewhere to make it work, or at least for the car's screen to let you play Pac Man when the steps are completed.