25 weeks, 1 day

Dylan would please like to meet her brother now. She declared her intention to hold him the other day, but with me as an intermediary it was not as satisfying as she would have liked. This evening she announced she had a few things she would like to tell him, but got distracted by I'm not sure what, possibly a breeze.

I am advocating for a few more months before we do any introductions. I still feel mostly fine, a little lumpy, and highly irritated at the very long formal sessions in the hospital where you have to stand there looking professional while overheating and slowly dehydrating. I am now some kind of highly trained professional dried fruit (katefruit?). I must be impressing someone with my ability to both serve as a nutritious snack and as a packmule for pens and any other devices that can fit into my coat that might possibly be of some use to the people I am working with, sometime.

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The car is a big hit at BleisenHaus. Dylan would sit in the driveway all day gazing out the tinted windows, while Snuffy alternately lounges in the back (it's a transformer! the back seats fold right down into the floor. i assume the next step in the transformation is for the doors to turn into arms, but we haven't found that button yet, despite aaron's diligent and ongoing reading of the owner's manual) and tries to balance on the passenger seat (along the lines of an elephant in a cartoon who has been startled, probably by a mouse, and leaps up with all four legs onto a chair. then the mouse runs in circles around the chair and it wobbles ever more uncontrollably until they both topple into a pile of hilarity on the floor)(should i pitch this to someone?).

The point of the car is that once we have TWO (2!) of the wee ones, we will be able to fit all our selves, car seats, large dogbeast, AND luggage and/or friends into one vehicle. Previously we had maxed out at various configurations that involved either the dog OR the luggage OR the friends, with additional combinations possible if one had ample time to devote to packing (usually luggage, sometimes friends) and one had recently brushed up on one's jenga skills.

This was our first experience buying a car from a haggle-like place, since the subaru was from a no-haggle place where they tell you the price and then you pay that price. If things didn't go well we planned to employ Annie as our spokeswoman, who I have heard learned how to artfully hurl personal insults during the bargaining process in her tenure in the Peace Corps. In fact things did go reasonably well because it seems to be true that at the end of the month the nice salespeople want nothing more than to reach some kind of mythical car sales number and don't much care about the price that they receive for their wares. So the gentleman just gave us a price without any threats or counteroffers or subterfuge, as we had been led to believe would be necessary, and it was like $5 over the invoice price per the internet, and there was a rebate that they don't usually have, plus we drove away quickly before they cashed our check, so it all worked out.

He told us they had sold over 100 cars in July for the cash for clunkers program and had yet to receive any money for them, so the dealership had essentially put up $500,000 that they weren't sure they were going to get back. This was before the government announced extra money for the program, so the dealership was getting really nervous and thinking of stopping it.

Anyway, anyone who's up for a joyride let us know. Be warned though, it's sort of the opposite of a chick magnet though, and cancels out the cute kid and the cute dog in that respect.