What can I say? Ben is out of town, Jen (who may soon be caped and given superhero powers) offered to take Silas once again, the baby is due in only four weeks, and I am doing weird things like waking up at 2AM to scribble down reminders about scheduling a haircut, asking Sara about her breast pump, and finding a rocket ship at a toy store for Silas...
Nesting, for me, first and foremost means aggressively going through everything -- closets, drawers, towels, clothing, glove compartments -- and throwing things away. There are a few areas of the house (which may or may not belong to Ben) that I pretend I can't see -- like certain nests of wires or heaps of half opened mail or bags of plaster or jumbles of power tools -- because I don't even know where to begin there, but the rest I have tackled.
Apparently, the next stage of nesting involves washing loads of teeny clothing (and then rewashing them because I forgot to use sensitive detergent and dryer sheets), folding them into little pink and white squares, piling them neatly on new shelves, hanging mini dresses on mini hangers, laying blankets in a cradle, and putting little shoes at the foot of the bed. Oh goodness...
Stage three is about finishing every possible unfinished house project and involves heavily shopping: buying the missing living room carpet, something for the newly bare mantle, rugs for the hall bathroom that will join the baby's "room" and become her "nursing suite," buying a picture for the wall of our room, picture frames, a cheese grater to replace the one that broke-- on and on.
Stage four, closely tied to three, is anticipating future needs and buying more things: cleaning products, nursing bras, comfy pajamas, something to wear in the hospital, presents for Silas, shoes from Zappos (which mostly didn't fit, though the experience of discovering a large box of shoes on my doorstep was quite pleasant), milk.
And stage five, which is ongoing and seems to create lots of mess in the meantime, is bringing all the new things into the house and putting them in their places (which today involved a lot of heavy lifting, which I'm pretty sure is forbidden when one is this pregnant).
Today, mid-nest-hurricane, I did hit a low when Silas asked for milk (for the zillionth time), and I made him a cup of water with a splash of heavy cream in it. Apparently, though I have been running tons of errands, I haven't been to the grocery store recently...
And then there was a second low this evening. After I picked Silas up from Jen's, though it was only 30 minutes until his bedtime (which means it was bath, story and milk time), I took him to Target "to buy milk" -- and a long list of unspoken other things. As we shopped, I could feel my blood sugar level plummeting, but being on a mission as I was, many missions, really, I pushed ahead. I knew I had overdone it, though, when I suddenly passed into frantic-ravenous-pregnant-starvation-mode -- a mode in which I should not be allowed to have any conversations or interactions with other living people, nor drive a car really -- and tried to eat Silas's cheese stick like my life depended on it. He's not one for sharing food, so we paid and hurried out. As I was loading bags into the car, I couldn't help but rip open the bag of english muffins and package of turkey (I'd somehow bought mayo and mustard too!) and smear together a sandwich as I stood at the trunk and Silas sat barefoot, still in the red cart facing on-coming traffic, asking to go potty.
And that was today.
