Our baby continues to grow --the arms are almost full-length, while the legs have some catching up to do. The spleen should be operational (thank god! Now what the heck is a spleen...) S/he is 3 1/2 inches long.

The salivary glands are operational and the esophagus and windpipe are present which means one important thing -- the baby can spit! We've still got pooping and puking to work on, but soon we'll have an honest-to-goodness working baby.

As for Elisa, she's gone three days without vomitting (hot!), her belly is clearly growing (hotter!), and her breasts are, well, something like double Ds (hottest!).

And me? Well, I'm having a hard time with the 'growing up' part. It all came home for me as we settled on a new car this past weekend.

Currently we have one of these:

Funky and fun and all, but no longer practical. Getting to the back seat is already a pain, add a car seat and we're talking torture. The lease expires at the end of the month, and with all the trouble the car has caused us (one repair after another), there was no way we were going to buy the car.

In a pre-baby world, I would've replaced the Bug with one of these:

That's a MINI Cooper, made by BMW, and totally hot. I would've picked one up in yellow, with a red racing stripe down the middle. Sigh. Or, if the money was right, I would've tried to get me one of these:

But those are options for a whole different world, now referred to as "fantasy". We are now "starting a family", and we can't make decisions based on "cool" or "radical" (not that I would ever make any decision based on "radical"), but on "practical" and "what's good for the baby" instead.

So what were our options? One of these?

Well, Elisa wanted nothing to do with a stationwagon. And to be honest, my family made their way north to the US from El Salvador, back in Christmas 1979, packed into one of these Ramblers (except imagine it with fake wood panneling along the sides):

Brrr! Never again. Though I admit my brother and I built multi-room forts in that back seat using pillows and blankets (and I'm not kidding). The thing was a boat, probably bigger than what any lame SUV can offer today.

Speaking of SUV's, there's no way we would ever do one of those. Jesus, thousands just died in Iraq to whet the energy needs created by those environmental monsters. Screw that. And in any case, I don't want to be an asshole. And it's now common knowledge that driving an SUV automatically turns you into an asshole.

As for mini-vans, we'll wait until soccer age before we even begin to consider one of these:

Actually, who's kidding who? We'll never get a minivan. Nothing against them, I suppose, except that if we wanted to be middle-aged and suburban, we'd wait 5-10 years and move to the suburbs.

So what to do, what to do? We considered one of these:

But jesus, that car is so, well, adult. Screw that! I might actually have to concede my age and acknowledge that I have to be "responsible". I'm not quite willing to take that drastic step just yet.

We could've gone for a nice BMW or Mercedes, but we would've had to sell the baby to afford them. And I don't think we could do that. Can you imagine the tax hit we would take?

Nissan? Nah. Suzuki? Their ads are too stupid. Toyota? Yawn. Mitsubishi? Mazda? Those cars don't really scream "family" to me. Any American car? Ha ha ha ha!!! Phew! That was a good one.

So that left Subarus, or as everyone seems to call them around here -- Lesbian-mobiles. One gay colleague of mine said, "aren't Subarus 'lesbianic'"? What the hell does that mean? "Lesbianic"????

But luckily for me, I am secure in my sexuality. I know for a fact that I am not a lesbian! And in any case, check out this beauty:

It's the Subaru WRX. Nearly 230 horses on 4 cylinders, four-wheel drive, excellent safety ratings, power up the wazoo. Guys, you know what I'm talking about! And the car has lots of space for my cycli -- er, baby's gear.

Of course Elisa took one look at it and said, "I told you I didn't want a station wagon". Thing is, the WRX is not a station wagon, it's a sports wagon. See, it's an important distinction made by Subaru's marketing department, and dammit, I was going to run with it.

Any any doubts I may have had were erased when I saw my hero Lance Armstrong in a WRX commercial a week or two ago. Is Lance Armstrong a lesbian???? Didn't think so. Harrumph!

Elisa finally agreed to the WRX wagon after weeks of lobbying. So the moral of the story is to bitch and whine until your sick, dehydrated pregnant wife caves in and you get everything you asked for. Ha ha! Just kidding! That's not the moral. The moral of the story is "never kick a pregnant woman when she's down".

Wait, that's the moral to another story...

Ok, I think I've got one -- everything we do from now on, we have to filter through the baby's needs. It's not about "us, us us" anymore, it's about, "what's best for the baby".

And deciding to buy the WRX was a great example. I mean, the baby needs 230 horses. The baby needs the upgraded sound system. The baby needs a bike rack.

Sigh. I guess my needs are no longer worth a darn.