A Difference in Perspective

I had to go on a bunch of errands yesterday morning. I had glorious free morning and each was the sort of thing that was fairly quick to do without children in tow but take ages when also trying to wrangle. Or, at least I thought. I had the absolute worst luck at every store- photo kiosks were broken, delivery trucks delayed, stores short staffed, and on and on. This gave me a lot of time in which I stood around waiting with other customers, for whatever reason they all tended to be women of a certain age who all wanted to know about when I was due. To each I gave my standard answer of "August," occasionally qualifying it with an "early." The answers varied but all were permutations of "You must be so hot," "I bet it can't come soon enough," and "You still have a ways to go, then, huh?" To each I wanted to answer "Are you out of your mind?"

I have been hot since March. Dressing the children in weather appropriate clothing was a constant struggle this spring as I had to keep reminding myself that 55' is not actually short sleeve weather for the rest of the world. The fact that summer is hotter than spring means little to me and, as I keep pointing out, we do live in an age of air conditioning and freely available cool water.

In regards to the baby's impeding arrival, I have been solidly fixed in the mental state of vague impending doom for the last month, at the least. I have 6 weeks or so left and I need every bit of that time to have any hope of being ready for his arrival. The nursery is in the middle of being remodeled. While a good hunk of it is done, it is still far from habitable and I know from experience that if it's not done by the time the baby gets here, it will next be worked on when the baby is 16 months old. Take out is not a terribly viable option with my gestational diabetes so I've been doing a vast amount of cooking for our day to day life. Since I'm still experimenting with just how many carbs I can eat, cooking ahead is not really an option. Add in that the heavy emphasis on meat, dairy and nuts and the grocery budget has little wiggle room. This means the freezer stocking that I tend to start by now, hasn't happened. I have yet to go through fall clothing for the children to see what needs to be bought, hitting the August back to school sales will be a challenge this year. Nor have I gone through our newborn clothes to see if Noah will have anything clean to wear. As far as I'm concerned, this baby is coming any minute and I'm woefully ill prepared.

I have developed a powerful nesting instinct this go around that I'm trying to take advantage of. I have a theory that while there is something to the idea of the nesting thing, it's also the end result of your body slowly going completely out of your control. While there are definite evolutionary advantages to women wanting to get things in order shortly before a baby arrives, it seems like there is also a very real element of control as well. Not only is your body doing things that it never does otherwise, you know that you have the impending arrival of this unknown permanent house guest whom you will be expected to care for and keep alive and LIKE for the next indeterminate number of years. You generally don't know quite when he will arrive, what sort of things he likes to do, how he will sleep, etc, etc. And so, if I can't get a handle on anything else, I can at least corral my baking supplies. So far, I have rearranged kitchen cabinets, bathroom closets, the Y has received a steady stream of donations, pictures are being hung, and lists are being made. If I just keep finding new projects to do, I can ignore the fact that I have a body in rebellion, that I have desperate desire to eat the completely out of the question french toast with syrup, and that I have this mild sense of panic about just what I decided to get myself into 33 weeks ago.