while i was somewhere in the vast wastelands between richmond and fredricksburg (my least favorite part of the trip) i started doing a little math to see out how many times i’ve covered the 180-odd miles in the last 15 years.

172.

that’s 21 round trips over my first three months after graduation in 1997 (where i commuted a three day a week internship from Williamsburg to DC) plus a round trip approximately every three months for the next 14 1/2 years.

this inspired me to do a little stop-motion photography on the way back to share the love.

with about 30 minutes of forethought, we went shopping at World Market for a dining room table last week. all of our chairs are frail, and not certain to survive another sparklet-like force of nature. four of them are actually heirlooms, which makes them both more fragile and the ramifications of said fragility to be more pronounced.

fortunately, sparklet’s old enough to help with assembly.

speakingof which, sparklet is old enough to repeat everything we say. on the way back from buying our table (cheap, president’s day sale!) we drove up to our house (8pm on a Saturday) and found parking right in front, which I celebrated by saying:

holy crap!

sparklet was equally enthusiastic in her response, testing out the phrase in five different tones, emphasises, and vocal qualities.

it doesn’t appear to have stuck, thank God — but the warning shot went low across our bow.

mommy had a doctor’s appointment a couple weeks back, and while she and the doc were talking about the coming thing two, they noticed she was coming in pretty big and pretty fast.

so they scheduled up another sonogram for last Friday, just to see exactly how big (and whether we’d need to adjust the delivery date, etc.) a sonogram at this point is fairly unusual — you don’t get one after 20 weeks unless the doctor specifically recommends one — but we were pretty excited to see the baby one extra time.

so Friday morning, we walk into the exam room and met with our tall spindly (dude) sonographer who started chatting us up about what we were having (girl), whether we had picked out any names (we had) and other stuff that wasted time while he got everything dialed in.

and then he started giggling. it wasn’t a bubbly giggle, but more like a nervous “you’re going to rip my head off” sorta giggle.

“i’m afraid you’re not having a girl.” turns out thing two isn’t a she — she’s a he.

and, no, we’re not kidding.

for now, let’s just skip past 20 minutes of “are you sure?” and “no, really — are you sure?” and “well, she was pretty sure when she told us it was going to be a girl…” that followed.

funny thing, is we remember that other sonogram pretty clearly.

when she first told us it’d be a girl, the lady sparkler said something like “really? are you sure?” in the same way that any mommy-to-be would say after hearing pretty much anything — and she got all huffy.

“i’ve been doing this for 26 years,” she said. “and i’ve never been wrong once in all those years.”

well, there’s always a first.

fast forward to now — we’ve got a boy coming, he’s got a lovely peach bedroom, with a soft purple rug, with bright flowered sheets, lots of pink clothes waiting for him when he gets home, in a bedroom filled with (hand be down) white, French Provencal furniture.

now, mommy and me can see the future — when this all turns out great, and becomes the story that (much to thing two’s consternation) we will faithfully drag out at every holiday, graduation and meet-the-new-girlfriend occasion.

however, in the interim, we’ve got about six weeks left to redo about six months worth of mental planning. the good news, is that (shortly before all this happened) we had basically decided on a name.

i think he’ll make a great “madeline.”