Some people say that dreams are kind of like your brain’s rehearsals for real life event. I’m finding myself in full-on daydream mode today, trying to imagine exactly what it’s going to be like when Diana calls or announces that her water has broken, or that she’s having strong contractions and we should head to the hospital. I guess I figure the more I prepare and visualize it now, the smoother things will go.

(It should be noted that my actual sleep-dream last night was about Philip Rivers throwing a touchdown pass to Tomlinson in the back of the end-zone, and he dropped it, not only missing an opportunity for the Chargers, but messing up a potential double-dip opportunity in my Fantasy league.)

Diana had her weekly doctor’s appointment this morning, and everything is doing well. Hearing other women’s “dilation and effacement” numbers always creeped me out a little, so I’ll refrain from that. I will say, however, that things are progressing well, and the doctor was pleased. So hopefully that translates into an easier labor when it finally arrives, but who knows.

We had dinner with my parents last night, who are back from Montana, and it was nice to see them. We somehow found ourselves in a good, constructive conversation about how to deal with differences of opinion and various conflicts that might come up in the next couple months. I don’t really anticipate any serious problems, but I’ll be blunt and say that with two sets of grandparents in such close proximity, there just has to be the potential for conflicts and hurt feelings at some point. I don’t even know what, exactly, but my gut says SOMETHING will come up at SOME point. So it was nice to preemptively get ourselves on similar footing. And if there aren’t any problems and it was all for nothing, no harm done.

We gave my parents a combined birthday present which I’ve been really excited about. It’s the eStarling 2.0 digital picture frame. It’s a small LCD screen in a picture frame that will display a slideshow of digital pictures. What’s really cool about it is that it connects to your wireless network, which means you can do cool things like point the frame at an RSS feed (for instance, a Picasa web album, or a Flickr channel), and the frame will update itself as pictures change. You can also email pictures directly to the frame itself. The plan is that I’ll maintain some sort of web album, so my parents will wake up one morning and have a fresh set of pictures displaying on their frame. I’ll also share the email address with my brother, so he can email pictures to it, too.. It’s pretty neat, and seems to work as advertised. We’ll see how it goes.

Another thing that’s been on my mind lately is if/how my relationship with my friends will change after little Spraggette is born. It’s hard to know exactly how things are going to go at this point, and therefore hard to predict how much time I’ll have for a game night at Eryns, or a round of golf with Iwan. And even if I have time, will I have the energy? And if I have the time and energy, will I even still want to do those things? I don’t know the answer to any of those. I can’t emphasize enough how much I enjoy the time I spend with my friends, and I anticipate that remaining a priority in my life, but I also realize that priorities might need to be shifted to some degree.

I guess to sum it up, I enjoy my relationship with my friends, and the idea of that changing (in isolation to everything else) doesn’t appeal to me. Lucky for me, my friends collectively excel at flexibility, so I’m sure everything will work out. In fact it has to, with Rock Back coming out so soon!