The room is painted in non-VOC latex paint.  Heirloom furniture acquired, assembled, disassembled, and re-assembled using ALL of the screws this time.  But what else can you do with that restless bottom-of-the-ninth (month) energy?  Fact is, there’s a list made by the people who keep track of these things that you should know about.

1. Slip in a date.  Maybe the first place you ever had dinner.  Maybe the pan-Asian vegan barbecue and tapas place you’ve been meaning to get to.  In any case, grabbing a quiet bite to eat, just the two of you, might be the last time you get to say “just the two of us” before the tadpole arrives.

2. Compliment each other on the raw bravery/balls/ovaries you’re about to exhibit in raising a newborn.  You’re about to launch a new human being out into the world.  You each need to know that the other thinks you’re pretty amazingly courageous.  If you’re doing the single parent thing, now’s a good time to talk with your besties.  Tell ‘em what you need.  They’ll come through.

3. Take the birthplan you put together. (You have written a birthplan, right?  After all, you’re reading a parenting blog.  No blog-reading techparents-to-be worth their Facebook page are without a birthplan.) Put it in a safe place.  Leave it there when you head to the hospital. Once the contractions start, you’re the special guests at a show you bought tickets for a year ago.  Whatever you think is going to happen is nothing like what will happen.

4. Subscribe to a mindless magazine.  Doesn’t matter how far through that Pynchon novel you are when the baby comes; you’ll be doing well to squeeze off 15 minutes of reading.  And that’s plenty of time to digest a gossipnugget or three from People, Entertainment Weekly or OK Go!.

5. Change the oil in your car. If you live in the city and take public transportation, count your blessings and gloat on your minimal carbon footprint.  If you’re like the other 80 percent of us who depend on our cars, you should know that your car will not complain about the lack of maintenance you show it just after the baby shows up.  Instead, it will putter along until one afternoon when you’re on the way home from the store with much-needed supplies.  The engine will seize up and start making that “something under the hood’s about 800 dollars worth of effed up” sound. Takes a half hour, saves you a week without a car.

6. Go see a no-brainer movie with your friends. Check in with your buds before the blessed bundle makes its debut.  They’ll help you remember that you had a life before the baby came and that you have one waiting for you when you get past the first few frantic weeks.

7. Lock in who’s coming when, how long they’re staying and where they’re staying. Back in the day, mothers and mothers-in-law would jockey for who would come into town first to “see the kids and the baby.”  Ideally, you’ve got a trusted grown-up (or three) to come stay over the first couple of weeks.  Don’t let them stay over on the futon, regardless of how comfortable they say it is.  Offer to pay for a nearby motel or arrange to have them stay with friends.  You’ll all appreciate having a little breathing room at the end of the day.

8. Arrange a cleaning service to visit while you’re at the hospital.  You’ll probably pay about two hundred bucks or so, but you’ll come home to sparkly toilets, cleaned-out fridge,  crisp hospital corners on the bed and an overall sense of “Aaaahhh, it’s good to be home.”  That and the bathrooms should probably all be clean at least once during your progeny’s first year in residence.

9. Buy yourself some new sheets. You’ll both appreciate not going to sleep on the same ratty sheets you’ve been using since you married/shacked up/committed yourselves to the relationship.  More importantly, when the baby starts leaking while you change him/her in the middle of the night, it’s nice to have an extra set of dry ones. Target.com’s got ‘em in bamboo, modal and 100% organic-grown cotton.

10. Lay back the staples. Peanut butter, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, microwave popcorn, Gala apples, whatever your standby food is, do yourself a favor and stock up. Having a plentitude of food you can tolerate can spell the difference between “happy, well adjusted” and “failure to thrive” (You, not the baby.)

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