Nesting

Knee-deep in the third trimester, I’ve been going through a serious bout of nesting. It’s tough when you’re buried in piles of To Do lists but don’t have the energy to stand up from the couch. However, by capitalizing on short lived energy spurts and an incredible amount of help from my hard-working husband, we’ve been making it through the final weeks of pregnancy that always seem to coincide with lengthy and illogical lists of chores.

The first (and probably most fun) task in preparing for baby is sorting through your older children’s clothes. Having two girls spaced two years apart means that I probably won’t have to buy a single item of clothing for #2. However, I still needed to sort through and organize the mountains of clothes that Evee has outgrown. A more organized mom would have already stored old clothes by size and season, but where is the fun in that?

Sorting through Evee’s outgrown clothes

The most daunting task on my To Do list was to refloor the kitchen. Sure, this doesn’t seem like it has much to do with a newborn baby. However, since we ripped the (already stained, already torn) linoleum while moving the refrigerator in the first week of buying this house, I have been eager to refloor. We did a mountain of home renovation tasks when I was pregnant with Evee, so it’s no surprise that we didn’t make it to reflooring before she was born. Of course, after Evee was born, home renovation came to a screeching halt. Now that she’s older and much more independent, we have to capitalize on the short time we have left to get these big projects done before we re-enter the psychosis of caring for an infant. So with $500 in supplies and a full weekend of hard work, we managed to tear out the old, damaged linoleum and replace it with a really sturdy “floating floor”.

Josh ripped up the old linoleum and Evee put the pieces in the trash bag

Brand new interlocking tile floor!

Our weekends are usually centered around fun, toddler-focused family activities, so Evee was pretty bummed out that we spent the whole weekend reflooring, but we made it up to her over the following weeks with lots of play dates, river swims and generally awesome outdoor fun.

After a boring weekend doing home renovation, we treated Evee to some old-fashioned toddler fun

We built three more planter boxes to line up with the three planter boxes we built a few years ago. Now with 6 boxes, we have created a sturdy fence at the top of our backyard retaining wall to stop young children from running down hill and falling 4 feet onto a concrete patio. It’s really just an eco-friendly toddler suicide prevention device.

Row of planter boxes to keep children from falling off the retaining wall 🙂

We’ve also rehabilitated an old dresser to store baby’s clothes, painting it the same purple and green color combo that I used for the new planter boxes. I’ve replaced our frighteningly ugly love seat (featured in the picture above where I’m sorting Evee’s clothes) with a much less frightening love seat from craigslist. And of course the house has been deep cleaned.

Since I am planning a home birth, there’s some extra work that needed to be done to prepare for that. Apparently, a home birth generally requires an enormous amount of linens to mop up all the blood, gore, and amniotic fluid that will be flung about all willy nilly. So I asked for a linen donation from a local hotel, and they offered me a huge pile of sheets, towels and washcloths that no longer make the cut for room service. I bleached all of these, ran them through the hottest, longest drier cycle and stacked them into 10 paper grocery bags and stapled them shut. Each bag of linens was sterilized in my oven for an hour at 250*F, and piled in a giant box with other home birth supplies. We also bought an inflatable kiddy pool for me to labor in and a box of medical supplies that includes chucks, umbilical cord clamps, sterile scissors, latex gloves, plastic sheeting, etc.

Now I’m 37 weeks along (officially full-term!), and finally feeling like we are ready for this baby. Evee has been watching home birth videos every day and cannot WAIT to help take care of a newborn. She frequently reminds me that if she is sleeping when the baby comes, we need to wake her up so she doesn’t miss it. My mother in law is coming to stay with us for 3 weeks to ease the transition, the midwife is on stand-by and my body can’t possibly handle gaining more weight. So come on, baby!