"Maybe he's waiting for us to choose a better name before he comes out."

"Why? What could possibly be wrong with Travis?"

"I told you, we're not naming him Travis."

"Well, let's just wait to see if he looks like a Travis. Or a Roy."

"Well that didn't work. What now?"

"He's just too comfortable in there. Remember how they were able to get all those enemy combatants in Guantanamo to admit all kinds of stuff by playing rap and Barney songs really loud? Maybe if we play some really annoying records really close to your belly, he'll go crazy and want to escape. Like Manuel Noriega."

"Let's start with some Twitty."

"Conway Twitty looked just like my grandpa."

"Yeah, kind of, but with a 'fro instead of that slicked-back mobster hair."

"It always creeped me out as a kid because Twitty's such a pimp. He's like the Barry White of country music. Every one of his songs is about cheating or getting some."

"Mmmm. Tight Fittin' Jeans. This is a good song."

"Yeah, too good. Let's switch up."

[Reading from the album sleeve] "The calliope is essentially a thing of the past. With its passing, an age passed as well. There was a time when the cheerful tootling of the calliope served as a gay and gaudy herald for old-time circuses, menageries, and county fairs."

"It's like a Zamboni pipe organ. Pretty gay, alright."

"Calliope was not the muse of crappy music."

"You know why there aren't calliopes around anymore? Because Satan bought them all up to provide a soundtrack for hell."

"Who was Denny McClain?"

"The greatest Tigers pitcher of the 60s, and the last pitcher to win 30 games in one season. A well-known philanderer and gambler, too, as well as an accomplished organist."

"Why is he playing 'The Look of Love' as an instrumental on an organ?"

"I think Burt Bacharach should be interpreted by more major league baseball all-stars on Hammond X-77 organs."

"Ewww, put that calliope record back on."

"I took this one from my Grandma. I just like the picture of his church on the back. The Cathedral of Tomorrow."

"If I could go to that church, I would totally be a repressed patriotic homophobe."

"Oh my god, turn it off before we turn this wombling into a Republican."

"This record is actually pretty good."

"Yeah, and she's hot, too."

"Way hot."

"Dear 1980 Tanya Tucker, can you be my dreamlover?"

"This album is the answer to the question What would it sound like if Neil Young tried to make a Kraftwerk album?"

"I don't think anyone ever asked that question."

"I own it on CD, too."

"You should never admit that to anyone."

"Remember that scene in The Sopranos when Tony wants to back out from a contract for a beach house but the seller won't let him, so he gets two of his toadies to play Dino songs from a boat behind the seller's house?"

"Yeah."

"That would have worked much better if they had used this album."

"Hey, this is one of my favorite records."

"You really shouldn't admit that either."

"I wonder if Mildred and Julie Ann have a Myspace page."

"This is bad, but not as assaultive as it needs to be. I wish I hadn't thrown away all those StryperLPs back in the eighties."

"You want something assaultive?"

"Come on, this is a band with like four dozen banjos!"

"They should have titled their album BANJO ASSAULT 3: RELENTLESS BANJOS!"

"BAY AREA BANJO ORGY, 1981."

"Maybe you should get out your banjo."

"Maybe you should shut the hell up. Besides, it has a broken string."

"This isn't working."

"Don't you wonder if all this is having the opposite effect, like maybe he's in there with his hands over his ears convinced that our home is a place filled with strange and terrifying music that he never wants to leave the womb for."

"Well, I guess he'd be kind of right, wouldn't he?"

Me: "You know, lots of spicy food, two mile walks. We're doing all we can."

My mom: "A co-worker of mine asked if you'd considered intimacy as an option. I told her I wasn't sure."

Almost as bad as that time when I was fourteen and she said, "You know dear, hands and mouths are wonderful things."

But at least I didn't have to hear her say the words "nipple stimulation."

Right now my wife and kid are sitting in the Fox Theater, watching Sesame Street Live without me. While I actually had a reasonably tolerable experience last year speculating about the actors' backstage sex lives, this year I thought it would be nice to give the two of them some mother-daughter time before Wood has a y-chromosomed suckling attached to her twelve hours a day. And frankly, when it comes to Sesame Street Live, once is enough to get the whole idea.

The snow keeps piling on top of itself here. The other night I took the dog for a walk and by the time we got back to our front porch I couldn't see the footprints from when we'd left. My mother is across the state, staring at various weather reports, anxious about rushing to Detroit in a snowstorm to mind Juniper while Wood labors. When she herself went into labor for the first time thirty-one years ago this week, my dad had to take her to the main road on a snowmobile where an ambulance waited to take her to the hospital. Hours later into that snowstorm, I was born. It was her birthday.

Wood had been certain this baby would be born a little early. All her friends that have given birth in the last few months have done so weeks or even a month early. We watched the full moon wane without incident. "Juniper was born on her due date," I remind her. But she's convinced from reading and excessive googling that second babies come earlier. "He'll come when he's ready," I say, but this does nothing to calm her. I know part of the stress comes from having taken a week of maternity leave before he's born, knowing that she'll have to return a week earlier when he's so small and still needing her.

I still haven't packed my hospital bag, charged up the camcorder battery, or cleared my SD cards of 6 gigs worth of boarded-up art deco theaters, graffiti, and old highway signs. And yet I feel a mounting pressure, too. I'd better pack that bag. And I do have a feeling I'll soon have something more momentous to photograph than packs of wild dogs and half-burnt houses.

Update soon.

Wood is antsy. She doesn't know what to do with herself at home with us now that she's officially on maternity leave. "You don't want to keep playing SQUID CAVE?" Juniper and I ask, quite shocked.

"Let's go bowling," she says, hoping all the strikes and gutters will somehow inspire her womb to evict its occupant. 39.4 weeks pregnant, and the woman manages to outscore me. Even the kid, with her crafty use of the bumper lanes and her 4-lb ball with its 2.12 MPH rolls, somehow also outscores me. Bowling never was my game, dude.

Don't assume that our silence means anything. We'll post the second anything happens.

Every morning that I sleep past seven seems like the last, a gift, so it's cherished. I'm like a convicted white-collar felon embracing freedom for his last few days before showing up at the penitentiary door; I have a list of things that I want to do one last time, knowing it will be eons before I get to do them again. At the top of this list is sleeping. A lot.

When dropping the wife off for her last day of work yesterday, I realized, too, that I would no longer be able to just put the kid in the car and take her on the long, rambling drives we love around the city or out into the country, just the two of us. Instead of heading home that morning, we took Michigan Avenue west, the old pre-interstate Chicago road. Along the way I asked her again what she thought we should name her baby brother.

"Yagi-Yogi," she said without hesitation. This is her top choice among her five personal favorites, which also include Munja, Li-Li, Ace and Biddy-Bada-Boo.

"How 'bout Kwame?" I ask.

"No."

"I like Ace," I said.

"Why?"

"I don't know. He could be a quarterback."

She lets me stop to take pictures of old neon motel signs, those former beacons to weary travelers who'd park their DeSotos or Studebakers outside tidy little rooms, now dreary homes with low weekly rates for entire families who've been evicted or faced foreclosure, chainsmoking prostitutes, and other down-on-their-luck types. We pass trailer parks. Strip clubs advertising one-dollar chilidogs. Poverty that's the same as in Detroit, really, just a different color.

Our destination is the world's greatest thrift store, and it doesn't disappoint. I've hardly bought any clothes for little Yagi-Yogi yet, so the kid patiently follows me through rack after rack of tiny sleepers and onesies and teensy-weensie button-down shirts, taking seriously her role in helping me find clothes for her baby brother. I seem to always hit the motherload of early-eighties primary-color faded-label polyester goodness at this thrift store. Two hours and $76.42 later we leave with 45 outfits, five pairs of shoes, 15 sleepers, a bunch of toys, and three plastic bags full of books, including several lost bellbottom-age children's lit masterpieces such as Jennifer Jean, The Cross-Eyed Queen and About Handicaps:

I'm telling you, when I get done organizing the kid's library, we're going to have dewey-decimal subdivisions for hairlip-sensitivity fiction and illustrated polio memoirs.

After the thrift store, we take the dog for a long walk in a nature preserve I used to hike in all the time during law school. I check that off my list. We walk around Ann Arbor, stopping at Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger for a late lunch. She's no Blimpy novice: she takes a single patty with an egg, pickles, and mayo. She snuggles up next to me in the booth, shares her deep-fried broccoli. On the way home, she needs to pee. To prevent her whining about it, I tell her we need to be a team and look out the window for a good place to stop. "What's a team?" she asks.

"It's two people who work together to help each other out."

"Are we a team, Dada?" she asks.

"We are." I say. We were, I think, a really good team. We meander back down Michigan Avenue, stopping whenever we see something interesting, until we see the Detroit skyline in the distance. When it's five o'clock we pick up her mother at the old road's terminus, or its beginning, depending on how you look at it. She waddles out of her building and into the car. "Done with work," she sighs. "Now let's have this baby already."