Little plastic pieces everywhere

I feel I owe my deepest apologies to any of you who have ever set foot in our house before. The dust on top of the doorways was horrendous. I was, as I'm sure all of you were, properly disgusted when I discovered it. I took care of it a couple days ago and it's gone now, so I hope you'll find it in your hearts to return.

That's right: I've entered a stage of pregnancy renowned for the psychotic frenzy it induces in pregnant women. It's called nesting, and it's in the top 3 of my favorite things about pregnancy.

Nesting is a bit like the game Perfection that used to be so popular: you have a bunch of little plastic pieces and you have to put them all into their proper places before the timer runs out and takes years off your life as it rockets all the pieces into far corners of the room. Those of you who can't see any parallels here to having a baby have obviously never been around one.

In my case, the little plastic pieces are tasks that simply must be completed before Baby Girl arrives or she'll leave in contempt. They've included everything from reorganizing my own closet to cleaning garbage cans. (And getting the nursery finished as well--but we'll save that for another post!)

Unfortunately, my house itself is a bit like another plastic puzzle game popular in childhood--the square thing with 15 plastic tiles you have to slide into place using just 1 empty space to make a nice, neat picture. The particular challenge my house presents is that it's rather small, so to get one space organized you have to pretty thoroughly trash another, just like the puzzle game. The mess travels throughout the house in this way, occasionally shrinking and often growing larger.

Currently, if the picture in the sliding puzzle were a kitten, the kitten my house could be compared to would have one ear coming out of it's tail, a paw that's upside down and an orange spot where a gray spot is supposed to be, but otherwise would function as a pretty cute kitten. That's an improvement from even just a couple weeks ago, when the kitten would more resemble a crocodile, and a mean one at that.

Combine the two games--Perfection and the sliding puzzle--and you'll see that if I'd gone into early labor, we'd have a lot bigger problems than dusty doorways.

Fortunately, something in a pregnant woman's body kicks into overdrive in the weeks before birth to solve the dusty-doorway problem. It's so intense that I wonder what nesting pioneer women used to do. I have an entire house to get into order--and they only had 1 small, dusty room to organize. I can imagine them going slightly crazy as they swept that little dirt floor over and over to get it sparkling clean for Baby, much to the annoyance of sneezing family members who realize they now have to step down to enter the cabin. Of course, considering the local Target would've been a day's walk and rather sparse, maybe they put all that energy into making cute little outfits and crib bedding.

Watching a pregnant woman nest is a bit like watching a whale rock climb. For instance, she can't actually get near anything she's trying to clean--either her belly is too big or she can't really maneuver that way, so she has to kind of flop toward things, duster or rag in hand, and hope for the best. This leads to a lot of miscellaneous items falling on the ground, where she has to bend over* to pick them up--another challenge that could be misconstrued as humorous to the onlooker, especially as she gets creative in using her bare feet as an extra set of hands.

Speaking as the aforementioned whale, nesting is, therefore, a complete contradiction, and at times a rather cruel one. Nesting first instills in the pregnant woman an undeniable and rather desirable drive to get the house in order, and then renders her almost helpless to finish the job. And then it imposes a time limit (without, of course, telling the pregnant woman when she can expect to be out of time).

And poor Matt. Recognizing that Baby Girl will actually be joining us in just a few weeks (or hours), he's given me carte blanche on the honey-do list. Or at least that's what I'm conveniently assuming. I add things as fast as he can cross them off, and there's no end in sight (but don't tell him that). He's dealt with it in good humor, though, even when it crosses the line from Tasks That Seem Reasonable (installing carseat bases) to Tasks That Seem Strange and Uneccessary (hanging a perfectly good quilt on the wall in the nursery simply for decoration).

Yet I'm thrilled about nesting. Not only does it help me occupy the ever-lengthening days until the stork decides to knock on our door (a girl can dream, right?), but the house has never looked or felt better. Truthfully, without the nesting instinct, Baby Girl could expect to spend her first couple weeks sleeping in a plastic tote with only the good cat's favorite blanket as padding. Worse, her cute little socks wouldn't be washed, matched and carefully arranged by size in a cute little canvas box.

Despite all the nesting fun, I've learned through this that Baby Girl is quite the demanding little person. She's more demanding than any of our previous houseguests (who have returned again and again despite the dust over the doorways), and tougher to fool (nesting demands that I no longer just stuff anything unsightly into my closet). Here's hoping she finds everything to her satisfaction.


*Bending over in late pregnancy is a challenge not because pregnant women are inherently lazy, but because it's actually physically difficult. To simulate bending over as a pregnant woman, insert a 12-inch section of a 2x4 into your abdomen and seal it up (I'll let you figure out how to do this). Now bend over. See? You might be able to accomplish the same thing by strapping a ruler tightly to your abdomen, but I can't exactly test that right now. The thing is that Baby Girl's bones are fairly solid, so when she doesn't want me to bend over, we don't.