so much has been going on lately that just thinking about trying to blog about it seems overwhelming, but right now things are calm and i thought i’d bring things up to speed.

last saturday i picked up a moving truck, loaded it up with all my stuff and me, eric and ben drove it all to texas. it turns out texas is pretty far away. we hit the road at around 3pm on saturday with a goal of about 500 miles per day over 3 days. unfortunately, traffic was slow and the budget rental truck was pretty unstable, so we were cruising at only about 55mph most of the way. i spent most of the time following in the s2000, which turned out not to be a comfortable cross-country driver. by around midnight on the first day we ended up in chandler, arizona, only a little bit east of phoenix and about a hundred or so miles short of our first day’s goal. i spent the night in the truck and the guys slept in a motel, but we all only got about 4 or so hours of sleep before we were back on the road.

on sunday, we had an extra 100 miles make up, so we headed out early. figuring we had plenty of time, we made plenty of stops. we stopped at best buy for a while while ben bought a new dslr, we stopped at hat shops, steak houses and other random places. well at about 10pm (we left at 8am), we were about a hundred or so miles east of el paso and exhausted. these roads had no light and there was nobody anywhere. the guys started to get worried about me since i was just alone in the s, by myself and obviously weary. we had walkie talkies and i told them to just keep pushing on, but they insisted i take a break. when we pulled off in some town called kent, i imagined they were gonna say lets just crash here for the night and make it up tomorrow. turns out they just wanted to switch cars and let me take a break riding passenger in the truck for a while. you would have had to have been there, but there was something about us all being that tired and deciding to press on for another 170 miles that was just kinda an amazing show of will and strength. we finally made it into odessa a little after midnight and crashed at a motel 6.

finally on monday we were caught up to our schedule of 500 miles a day but i had to be in the leasing office by 6pm to get the keys for the apartment. it seemed that we had plenty of time, but we had the same thought about the day before so i didn’t want to take any chances. i left at 7am in the s2000 (speed limits on these roads were 80mph) and had a good, fast, uneventful drive all the way home. the guys showed up an hour or two later in the truck, we unloaded, dropped off the truck and went out to get some bbq. the guys flew out at 6am the next morning and i spent the next 2 days unpacking.

so now i’m back here in LA on baby watch. we’re due on tuesday and have been taking lots of walks and playing wii fit trying to get this baby action going. the doctor said if she doesn’t naturally start having the baby by the 26th that he’d induce labor, although at our appointment tomorrow, i’m going to ask that he induce on the 23rd if nothing’s started yet, because 1. i bet the hospital staff is going to be thin over the 3 day weekend and 2. i need to be back in texas by june 1st so i want to spend as much time with the wife+baby as i can.

so lots of things going on. once i do go down to texas, i’ll probably fly back at least every other weekend until taka moves down with the baby so i’ll still be around for a while.

i decided to take alex’s (and my cousin’s) advice and go with the modular car seat system, primarily for the ability to move inbetween car and stroller without strapping in/out and waking the baby. we put the chico cortina travel system on our registry, which is the stroller, car seat and baby carrier. the baby carrier/car seat is only good until about 20lbs (the stroller will still work) though, so since eric pointed me to a good deal that i couldn’t pass up, i also ordered the recaro como baby racing seat:

since we won’t need it for the first year, this will probably stay in grandma’s car until our girl outgrows the infant one. and don’t worry, once we are using it, we won’t be doing any spirited driving with it (actually, the s2000 passenger airbag can’t be turned off, so i think it’d be illegal to have a kid under 50lbs in that car anyway, and who drives an accord fast?), but at least they’ll look fast going slow.

oh, and so far we’re just registered at babies r us, you can view the registry here:
http://www.toysrus.com/ControllerServlet?target=search&srcPage=Product&registryNumber=77008863
(if the link doesn’t work, we’re the only ishi’s in the country registered there)

so we’re at t minus 3 months before our due date of may 21st and we’ve finally started to think about baby shower registries and baby room stuff. last weekend i painted one wall of the bedroom that will be the baby room, a lime/mint green and today i touched it up where i had missed some spots. we’re also going to paint the opposing wall the same color and leave the other two walls an off-white.

we also starting thinking about the registry and just getting an idea of the stuff we want and need and how much they cost. turns out baby stuff is expensive. we spent about 2 hours trying to find a stroller and a car seat, and we’re still not entirely decided. of course if money were no object, i’d go for the recaro seat, but at babies r us it was $300 :( there’s also just so many damn options. like there’s the complete modular option where you buy a baby carrier, that doubles as a car seat and can then be put into a stroller. the problem is that the carrier/car seat portion is only good until about 20lbs so after what, a year or so? we’d have to get another car seat. the way we’re thinking about going is to just get a nice car seat (which we can use from 5-50lbs or something) and a nice stroller.

as exhausting as the shopping and planning is, it’s exciting, because it’s making this all seem that much more real.