I Will Be Busy August 20

Since no one likes to work the weekend if they can help it, our due date has been moved from Sunday, August 19 to Monday, August 20. Not a big change, in the grand scheme of things, though I did have to figure out how to re-jigger the countdown clock to the right.

On one hand, my wife being induced means we'll miss out on any "Oh, this is it!" moment, but those stories usually end with, "So, I don't think we'll be allowed back in that restaurant any time soon." I can live with that.

At my wife's last doctor's appointment, she was given a seven-day window to select the date she'll be induced. Which then gave us an entire evening to discuss the minutae of our lives and how they relate to what date to have our child. It is a conversation few other couples have to have and it leads to things that are rarely uttered in when discussing the birth of a child:

• "Well, I have baseball tickets on the 16th, so if we could do it after that, I'd appreciate it."
• "If we do Friday, we won't be sitting around all weekend, waiting for it to happen, without any work to distract us."
• "Isaac Hayes and Robert Plant were born that day, so that's gotta be worth something.
• "With "The Sopranos" off the air, we won't be doing anything on Sunday night anyway

One of the hallmarks of my generation is that we try to control too much - we try to plan more than we should, as my mother-in-law puts it, "You make plans and God laughs." That may have been the case when creating this baby, but when it comes to delivering her, it will happen on my schedule. I mean, I already marked it on my calendar. Besides, this is the surest way to prevent a birth on the side of the road.