I enjoy shopping the adorable pink aisles of Babies R Us or Target, don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate pink. We’ve got all kinds of pink stuff at my house. But I couldn’t believe this classic toy needed a gender-specific makeover. And I didn’t see a blue one anywhere around. There were two. Rainbow, and this. And then I saw the pink school bus.Was the yellow school bus clashing with the decor of little girls all over our country? Is that why there would be a need for a pink school bus toy, exactly like the yellow one? Was there a blue school bus? No? I guess the yellow, multicolored school bus is masculine.

Next door was the pink Little People plane.

Perfect for those girls’ getaways … to a spa or a bachelorette party, right? The Sex and the City girls probably flew to Mexico in one of these after the big wedding scene. I’m going to New York this weekend and if my jet isn’t pink, well, it just won’t seem right. Again, no blue plane. Just the regular multicolored one. What was next? The pink Little People Barn? The pink Little People Tractor? The pink Little People Fire Truck?

As I came to the end of the aisle, one more surprise awaited.

The pink corn popper. While this little toy is the bane of some parents for the delight toddlers get in constantly wheeling it around the house to the incessant pop-pop-pop-pop-POP-pop, I secretly love the popper. Which is why I bought one for 25 cents at a yard sale this summer and have already given it to Babycakes. A regular, multicolored popper with red, yellow, blue and green balls and a blue handle.

Sigh. It will clash horribly with her pink bedroom. I hope she still knows she’s a girl.When she’s old enough to realize there’s a difference.

Confession time. My husband did all the daycare dropoff for our first daughter and I was really hoping he’d do it again and let me take our first daughter to school instead. For 8, nearly 9 years, the only person I had to get going in the morning was myself. Now, before moms who do morning duty start looking for bricks to hurl at my head, let me tell ya that I did pickup, dinner, homework, bath and bed by myself 95% of the time since my hubby works late hours. It was a perfect plan and it worked great for our family. He agreed to daycare dropoff since he gets to sleep in a precious few minutes extra. I love him!

So this week should be cake, right? He drops off the baby, I take the schoolager. Life is good. Except the very SECOND day, he has to go to work earlier than normal and could we switch? It all worked out, but I felt like a bumbling fool. Luckily, it was just our second day, so they didn’t expect me to know the system, but I felt like I should automatically know what to do, you know? Because I’m the mom.

And the very fourth day, I have to be at work early so I plan to take my schoolager to my mom’s who will brave the carpool line for me so I can attend a meeting. Only. We. All. Oversleep. At. My. House. My mom, being the best, comes to my house to take my schoolager, I get us ready in record time, my hubby gets the baby going. Life is still good. We’re back in the saddle, baby!

Now we’re having another baby girl in oh, a month. We don’t have a name. We have a middle name, which is the same as my daughter’s middle name, my middle name and my mom’s middle name. It’s Noel. My husband said this little girl would feel left out at Christmas if she wasn’t a Noel like the three of us — and he’s right.

So, Something Noel will be here in just a few weeks and goodness knows what we’ll call her. My husband’s been suggesting kind of sporty, genderless names. But they don’t go with our other daughter’s name at all. So I have been vetoing them. I’m not heartless. He started it with his vetoing of some of my favorite girls’ names. No Sophie. No Emily.

I can tell you her joke name is Lourdes, which rhymes with my last name believe it or not. But I don’t have her real name. We have several names in contention, but none of them are THE name right now, mostly because my DH insists on having a really solid nickname for the real name picked out at the same time.

We’re getting down to the wire. Between the book I bought, 100,000 Baby Names, and the two he bought, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Baby Naming with 30,000 Names, and 60,000 Baby Names, we’ve got 190,000 baby names. Most of them are weird and made up:

Tammilynn. (American. Tammy + Lynn)
Honestly, like I need a baby naming book to tell me that.

Lilibet (Lily + Elizabeth or Betty)

Aden (Irish) Girl’s name.
Aden? An Irish Girl’s name? It’s just a misspelled Aidan, which is an Irish BOY’S name! Heck, why not just name her Patrick? This author was stretching the whole 30,000 name thing, I can tell ya that.

And if you are an Irish girl named Aden, I don’t mean to make fun of your name, so please don’t flame me in the comments. It’s just not the right name for me and my baby girl, that’s all.

So now I’m going back through the 190,000 names in the three books. I’ve got four weeks. If I don’t ever sleep, that’s 672 hours. I’ll have to go through 282.73 names per hour to keep up with the schedule. Luckily, I can skip Sophie, Emily, Aden, Lilibet and Tammilynn.

They hooked me with an email request to a gang of us to go to lunch at Moe’s Southwest Grill — just about my favorite lunch spot — they know me too well. So my buddy A.K. and some of our interns snag me, but I was going to drive separately since I had to run an errand. Although this put them in a tizzy, they covered well and insisted I follow A.K.’s car. Moe’s is like 1 mile away, and as you now know, I am VERY well aquainted with how to get there. So I said “Follow you? Why? Do you think I’m going to get lost?”

Next thing I know adorable interns Amanda and Liz come running after me: “Can we ride with you? A.K.’s car is too messy.” So they start getting me to chat about stuff, while we’re following A.K. down the road. I start to turn towards Moe’s, but A.K. doesn’t. Quickly, Amanda says “Oh, we found a shortcut. Follow A.K.” I’m thinking … a shortcut past the turnoff to Moe’s? But I follow.

I stop for a yellow light. A.K. didn’t. She pulls off the road to wait for me. Then she keeps going and going and going. So Amanda’s saying “Oh, I remember, A.K. had to drop something off!” Next thing I know, we’re turning in to Oak Hollow Lake and this cute little park, and there’s everyone from the office with a picnic lunch in the shade by the lake. Is that not the cutest thing? Here take a look:

So, since I have gestational diabetes, Mary Leigh and Aleasha and the girls planned foods I could eat, even making me a special cake that had 15g of carbs per serving with sugar-free cool whip frosting!

But here’s the really cool part. They all think it’s really hard to surprise me and thought I MUST have known something was going on. On Monday, I gave Mary Leigh a picnic basket I found out in the garage when I was looking for Tory’s old baby clothes. I knew I would never use it and she collects them, so I gave it to her. I remember she was acting weird about it. “Why are you giving me a PICNIC BASKET?!” but just thought she was surprised and wondering if there was some occasion. She thought I knew about the party and was playing with her. Then when I asked Aleasha yesterday about doing a lunch for a coworker next Wednesday, she snatched up her Treo to make sure I couldn’t see calendar information about my shower or get any other clues. She says I barely missed seeing her with pink balloons and a present when I was coming in to work. Then when I didn’t ride in A.K.’s car today — she thought I knew for sure and was giving her a hard time on purpose! When they found out I was totally clueless and totally surprised, there was a report that they all felt a certain sense of triumph.

I just felt a certain sense of gratitude that I have such good friends who would go to such lengths to throw such a special party. I know I will never forget it.