Eight months and getting closer to October

We've finally hit eight months, and the baby is very close to four pounds. I would suspect that by now things must be getting cramped in there, but judging by the octopus limbs that are constantly bumping the inside of my belly, there appears to be plenty of space.

We've been keeping ourselves busy with administrative tasks such as finishing our Hypnobirthing classes, writing out our birth plan, deciding what we want to take to the birth center, whittling down our to-do lists, and switching over my insurance. My insurance transfer has not gone as smoothly as we would have hoped, unfortunately leaving me uninsured (and breaking Massachusetts laws) for the last 15 days. Hopefully I will be re-insured by Tuesday at the latest. Being uninsured and pregnant is a very bad idea. On a more positive (and slightly obsessive) note, all of our family Christmas presents are purchased, boxed, wrapped, tagged, and bowed--taking one huge task off the pre-baby to-do list.

Now that Christmas is taken care of, we can focus on a closer holiday: Halloween. For those of you who don't live in Salem, it is CRAZY during October. Salem is the Halloween capitol of the world. Why? We don't really get it; they weren't real witches. It doesn't help that the police cars feature a witch, as does the Salem News masthead, and a witch is the high school mascot. TV Land even erected a statue to Elizabeth Montgomery in Salem to commemorate an episode of Bewitched that was filmed here. While Salem does have fabulous maritime, literary, and architectural history, it can unfortunately get overshadowed by the towns plethora of witch museums and tourist traps. These attractions bring in over half a million visitors in October (to a town of 40,000 people) who spend $30 million. Halloween is craziness. We don't drive around Salem on the weekends; David doesn't go to work on Halloween because his commute would be close to 3 hours on the way home. As nifty as it might be to have a baby in October in Salem, we're glad that most first babies go 41 weeks, because the ultrasound estimation of Nov. 1 (based on the baby's height), is a little close for comfort. An October baby in Salem would be awful for visitors; there's no legal parking and no open hotel rooms and lots of crazy people.

October in Salem does bring one awesome thing with it, the Official Cat of Salem Contest. We didn't get costumes done in time to enter last year, but this year I'm more on the ball. We never thought that we would be pageant parents, but we're very excited. Maxwell is most likely going as a penguin. He was going to be Roger Conant (founder of Salem, pictured at top), but his hat would be difficult to make, and we don't think he would be recognizable--unless we painted him green. Mabel is going as Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter, which we think makes her a shoo-in. However, in Miss America style, we have to be able to verbalize why one of our cats deserves to be the Official Cat of Salem 2008. Any help on this would be appreciated. (As a note to our Salem readers, our kitties will open a giant can of whoop-ass if you steal their costume ideas.)