Nesting
This week is my first week off from work before the baby comes. I've been looking forward to this month before the baby ever since Shaughn and I decided we could probably swing it. This would be my month to spring clean the house, do some writing, read a book, and most of all to "nest." My vision of nesting has been this burst of energy I would feel to clean the nooks and crannies of my house, make space for our new roommate, and to set up the nursery with love and care until it just gleams with soothing smells and good parenting.
But four days in and nesting has presented itself very differently. Instead of calmly folding cute onesies and putting them lovingly in the new-to-us dresser that is ADORABLE, I got extremely annoyed that I couldn't find little baskets to fit in the drawers. This will never work. The first time I have to do laundry and put his clothes away, all these little piles will just fall over until it's one horrible drawer of chaos! Our baby will never have matching socks! We'll never find the pants to the little shirt Kristi got us! How have we failed ALREADY?!
I got rid of a bunch of books that I decided I will never read again and aren't buying enough "cool cred" to deserve a spot on my shelf. And then I got rid of all the books that bought the wrong kind of "cool cred". I mean who needs it? I have never had someone in my house who was feeling a little iffy on my coolness and then looked at my books and said, "What? Joyce! Nietzsche! Faulkner! You're so cool Melissa." Also, I don't even like like those dudes. In my mind, they only buy cool cred with male twenty something hipsters who majored in Poetry, maybe went to grad school, and are still into "irony." Which sounds little bitter on my end, because probably I am. Those guys are the worst! I spent way too much time trying to interpret whether they were cryptically saying they were in love with me, when really they were saying, "I think I've fallen in love with myself!"
Whatever. I'm over it. My point is, I have some extra space on my shelves. So I started consolidating shelves to make room for some baby supplies to keep in the living room in a little basket that I do not currently have because as I mentioned before, there are no baskets--worldwide--that will work. Then I got overwhelmed with all the knickknacks that have until this point been sentimental treasures. What they really are, are sentimental choking hazards. Remember our honeymoon? Well stop because it's keepsake is literally choking our child.
And THEN! in the midst of all this danger and failure, one of our chickens was murdered by a raccoon! Tuesday morning, after Shaughn had already left, I got a text from our neighbor who said she thought a raccoon killed our chicken and if we weren't home, her husband could go get it from the chicken yard. I rushed to go outside but then I saw her husband come in the gate and since I was in pre-pregnancy pj's (which means they "fit" in only the most generous sense of the word, meaning, they were on and sort of covering the parts of my body they were meant to cover) I immediately hid below the window and ran (and by run I mean lumbered surprisingly quickly) to my room to get pregnancy clothes on. When I came back, he had already retrieved the dead chicken and was gone. All that was left was a pile of feathers and a few guts in the corner of the chicken yard.
I called Shaughn who was furious about the situation. We sent each other texts back and forth throughout the day. Mine were feelings of sadness and failure and Shaughn's were feelings of rage and revenge. I brought him lunch mid-day and he threw his hands in the air and said, "Raccoons have more rights than I do!" Apparently there are a lot of limitations on what you can do about raccoons in the city. "If I were to go in someone's backyard and kill their chicken and be threatening, I could be shot! But if a raccoon does it, you can't do a damn thing!" And no he didn't appreciate my reasoning of a raccoon being a wild animal and the hope that he, my kindhearted husband, is not. However, the parts we do agree on is how awful it is that our chicken got brutally torn up by something that didn't even eat it and how uncomfortable it is that our neighbors heard the whole thing in the middle of the night and even tried to go scare the raccoon away while we slept just a few feet away in our house. The whole thing happened probably ten feet away from the window above our bed. How creepy is that?! You know what else is only 10 feet away from our bed? The nursery. We might as well give our neighbors one of the baby monitors because Lord knows we're not going to hear anything.
My hope is that, like morning sickness, nesting, too, will pass. Until then, heaven help my knickknacks, books, dirt (I didn't even get into how I just walk around with a bottle of mult-use cleaner and a roll of paper towels practically daring dust to show itself and then shooting it down with the cleaner like it was a six-shooter), raccoons, and all the ill-fitting baskets of the world.
But four days in and nesting has presented itself very differently. Instead of calmly folding cute onesies and putting them lovingly in the new-to-us dresser that is ADORABLE, I got extremely annoyed that I couldn't find little baskets to fit in the drawers. This will never work. The first time I have to do laundry and put his clothes away, all these little piles will just fall over until it's one horrible drawer of chaos! Our baby will never have matching socks! We'll never find the pants to the little shirt Kristi got us! How have we failed ALREADY?!
I got rid of a bunch of books that I decided I will never read again and aren't buying enough "cool cred" to deserve a spot on my shelf. And then I got rid of all the books that bought the wrong kind of "cool cred". I mean who needs it? I have never had someone in my house who was feeling a little iffy on my coolness and then looked at my books and said, "What? Joyce! Nietzsche! Faulkner! You're so cool Melissa." Also, I don't even like like those dudes. In my mind, they only buy cool cred with male twenty something hipsters who majored in Poetry, maybe went to grad school, and are still into "irony." Which sounds little bitter on my end, because probably I am. Those guys are the worst! I spent way too much time trying to interpret whether they were cryptically saying they were in love with me, when really they were saying, "I think I've fallen in love with myself!"
Whatever. I'm over it. My point is, I have some extra space on my shelves. So I started consolidating shelves to make room for some baby supplies to keep in the living room in a little basket that I do not currently have because as I mentioned before, there are no baskets--worldwide--that will work. Then I got overwhelmed with all the knickknacks that have until this point been sentimental treasures. What they really are, are sentimental choking hazards. Remember our honeymoon? Well stop because it's keepsake is literally choking our child.
And THEN! in the midst of all this danger and failure, one of our chickens was murdered by a raccoon! Tuesday morning, after Shaughn had already left, I got a text from our neighbor who said she thought a raccoon killed our chicken and if we weren't home, her husband could go get it from the chicken yard. I rushed to go outside but then I saw her husband come in the gate and since I was in pre-pregnancy pj's (which means they "fit" in only the most generous sense of the word, meaning, they were on and sort of covering the parts of my body they were meant to cover) I immediately hid below the window and ran (and by run I mean lumbered surprisingly quickly) to my room to get pregnancy clothes on. When I came back, he had already retrieved the dead chicken and was gone. All that was left was a pile of feathers and a few guts in the corner of the chicken yard.
I called Shaughn who was furious about the situation. We sent each other texts back and forth throughout the day. Mine were feelings of sadness and failure and Shaughn's were feelings of rage and revenge. I brought him lunch mid-day and he threw his hands in the air and said, "Raccoons have more rights than I do!" Apparently there are a lot of limitations on what you can do about raccoons in the city. "If I were to go in someone's backyard and kill their chicken and be threatening, I could be shot! But if a raccoon does it, you can't do a damn thing!" And no he didn't appreciate my reasoning of a raccoon being a wild animal and the hope that he, my kindhearted husband, is not. However, the parts we do agree on is how awful it is that our chicken got brutally torn up by something that didn't even eat it and how uncomfortable it is that our neighbors heard the whole thing in the middle of the night and even tried to go scare the raccoon away while we slept just a few feet away in our house. The whole thing happened probably ten feet away from the window above our bed. How creepy is that?! You know what else is only 10 feet away from our bed? The nursery. We might as well give our neighbors one of the baby monitors because Lord knows we're not going to hear anything.
My hope is that, like morning sickness, nesting, too, will pass. Until then, heaven help my knickknacks, books, dirt (I didn't even get into how I just walk around with a bottle of mult-use cleaner and a roll of paper towels practically daring dust to show itself and then shooting it down with the cleaner like it was a six-shooter), raccoons, and all the ill-fitting baskets of the world.
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