Evie’s very first visitor was my sister, her Aunt Niki. Niki brought up a great little onesie that she’d had custom printed from a website. The front of the onesie says “I am the champion”

… and the back says “of nothing in particular.”

“Get it?” Niki said. “Like the Smiths song.”

The back sounded incredibly familiar, but the front had me confused.

“I love it,” I said, “but you know what? I think I’ve had that lyric wrong for about twenty years. I thought it was ‘I am the son and heir of nothing in particular.’”

Niki looked a little panicked. “I’m pretty sure it’s champion,” she said. “Almost positive.”

We did a quick Google search. It was “son and heir.”

“Oh no!” she said. “But ’son and heir’ doesn’t work for Evie, anyway, and ‘I am the champion of nothing in particular’ is a much better lyric, right?”

Whether it makes a better lyric or not, I don’t know, but I like it about 1000x better on the onesie. It cracks me up every time I see it.

As a side note, I once spent a good hour or so on KissThisGuy.com, the archive of misheard lyrics (named after the mishearing of “kiss the sky” in Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”) By far my favorite entry, which I’ve remembered for years, was from someone who once thought “I’ll never be your beast of burden” was “I’ll never be obese, Roberta.”

So it turns out that Evie does actually sleep quite a bit—unfortunately almost all of it during the daylight hours. She’s almost impossible to wake during the day, but when I rock her in my arms at night, trying to get her to settle, she looks up at me, blinking, squirming and wide awake. Her biological clock seems to be running on a 12-hour lag from ours.

Her schedule makes sense, as in utero, she slept when Emma was awake and moving around, and started kicking just as Emma settled in for the night. Now we’re trying to help bring Evie into our time zone, while realizing that in these early days, she’s doing a far better job of introducing us to hers.

We’re sitting around and counting, and waiting. Emma is calm, as always. I am calm, for a change.

All the details are taken care of: I’ve packed the car, made the breakfast, dealt with all the last minute emails telling work folks I won’t be in for a while, fed Baci and called the dog sitter. There’s nothing now but to wait. I had no idea this part would be so relaxed and drawn out. If it weren’t for our little data chart here with its accompanying prescribed action plan, I would’ve driven Emma to the hospital right after her water broke, which was at 2am—5 hours ago. We’re not even at the point where we’re supposed to call the doc just yet.

So here we are, listening to NPR news on the laptop, counting and waiting. Calm and happy. Before long, we’ll be en route.

We’ve been busy readying ourselves for the impending arrival of our yet-to-be-publicly-named baby girl. Some quick, unordered points of note:

• Emma informs me that we now own yogurt that will expire after the baby comes.

• The baby has belatedly but assuredly turned downward for her final approach (meaning we aren’t locked into a c-section, thankfully). I figure she must be some kind of genius, knowing how to do this in the dark and under water.

• My dad continually refers to the baby as “Olivia,” swearing that he saw some sort of “tell” on my face when he called out guesses during Thanksgiving dinner. He’s wrong, though “Olivia” was a Top 3 contender for a good while. Emma’s sisters refer to the baby as either “Chardonnay” or “Shalissa.” Emma and I still mostly call her “It.”

• Emma and I took a course in infant CPR last night at the local hospital. Emma did great, but was not super keen on the bit where she was supposed to call out, “Help! Help! I need help!” in front of the class. Her mumbled plea for help made me laugh right into the CPR baby-dummy.

• I’ve learned (yet again) that the Internet is the single best/worst source of information imaginable. In trying to help Emma figure out best measures for pain relief during labor, I came across tiny scraps of very helpful information in the midst of heaps and heaps of vitriol spouted by people who are apparently very emotionally invested in other people’s choices (surprise!) It’s not just that you’re insane to get an epidural/intrathecal (or not), but that you’re a bad person to boot. Emma’s leaning toward being a bad, insane person of the pro-modern medicine variety (which I think is a good, sane idea).

• I figured that babies needed changing 2-3 times per day, but someone in the know just informed me that it’s more like 12 times daily. I hope this was some kind of sick joke, but I fear that it wasn’t.

• I don’t know much about what’s to come, but I’m pretty sure that a month or two into this whole parenting thing, I’ll be super sorry for a lot of stuff I said to my mom as a teenager.