As a Yom Kippur tradition we went out for dinner the night before the fast. I was rewarded at dinner with a reunion with my expensive $350 rain shell that had disappeared for the past six months. My dad was wearing it to get out of the rain and hadn’t connected that the coat he had found in a closet was my famed rain shell that had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and rafted down the Grand Canyon. At dinner we spent a long time discussing energy as it is the topic du jour of interest to everyone now that we have a new energy bill. The general result of the discussion was that I convinced my mother that hydrogen fusion is the answer to all of our energy problems as soon as we can get it to work and that if we can’t we’ll go into space to harvest the energy of the sun’s fusion to bring home to earth in a consumable energy form.

I probably will skip breakfast tomorrow but will eat lunch. Since I don’t believe in God this shouldn’t cause too much problem other than the part of me that as an atheist struggles against religious stuff. But the part of me as a historian and cultural person who wants to use traditions to help transfer valuable time tested moral codes on myself and my family I can stomach not eating for a few hours.

Today I became very excited about how soon the baby is coming. This came mainly from misreading my cell phone to make me think today was the 15th while it is really just the 12th . The 15th is meaningful because it is the day after Sarah leaves work to go on maternity leave. She isn’t technically due until Halloween, but the official alert level goes up a notch the day that Sarah officially stops working. That day means that we are ludicrously close to becoming first time parents for real. A baby outside that belly is a different situation from the baby inside. That’s my hunch. I also got anxious because my cell phone at work didn’t ring so when I was driving home I had four messages. That made me think that if Sarah were in labor I would have been very hard to contact and I might miss this whole birth experience.

So when I got home I was poking around Sarah’s belly and getting generally impatient that the apparently full sized baby inside wasn’t starting to make her way out. We thought about how we could start to go down the list soon of home remedy induction processes as soon as the 15th came around. We don’t want to have to go to the hospital for induction. Stay at home as long as possible is the plan.

This weekend on Saturday morning we took care of one of the last big steps in getting ready for having a baby. We got our car seat installed and inspected by the Brookline police. The location for the inspection is the same place as the public works building. We had scheduled the appointment for 9:30 in the morning but awoke at 9:29. So we knew we would be late. The plan had been to install it in the morning before we went and to clean out the back seat of the car so they didn’t tell us things like “You are going to be terrible parents because the back seat of your car is filled with garbage, pens, and flip flops that could kill a baby if they were traveling 30MPH after a head-on collision”. That was the least of our worries as we were panicked on being so late that we would have to fall into the next window of opportunity for car seat installation inspection two weeks, and potentially, too late.

So we drove based on the directions that the address was something like 877 Hammond Street and near the Putterham golf course. I have played golf at Putterham so we had no problem getting there but we then drove around in circles through a series of connected rotaries that spit you out in random directions like a pinball for forty minutes looking for the “Works” buildings. We first went into the back lot behind the firehouse on Hammond street. It’s very cool and worth checking out because they have a practice apartment building that they probably torch on a regular basis and some other practice burning things. But nobody was there so I made Sarah ask for directions at the golf course. They directed us to a hidden gate after the firehouse that led up a hill to the building where they inspect car seats.

At the inspection the officer who helped us informed us that it was OK that we hadn’t installed the seat yet. From what I could tell nobody gets around to installing the seat themselves before going to see the officer for installation. He borrowed the PT Cruiser owner’s manual and was amazed that my 2001 car had a non-mandatory safety feature of middle-seat clips for connecting a car seat into. So he installed very quickly and then gave us the lecture on cleaning out the car so we wouldn’t have flying garbage kill our baby after seeing the flip-flops, pens, gadget refuse, and McDonalds paper waste in the back seat.