Nesting

So. I’m still pregnant.

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That was me yesterday, at 39 weeks exactly. I decided to wear my pretty shirt instead of my usual striped T because I needed a little lift to get me out of the ocean of self-pity I’ve been wallowing in these past few weeks. Being pregnant is just SO HARD! POOR POOR POOR POOR ME!

(slap)

Sorry. Hey, howzabout I mention some ways in which this pregnancy has been easier than average? First of all, yesterday at my mom’s I discovered that I am having Braxton-Hicks contractions, I just can’t feel them. (My mom is a retired OB/GYN nurse, and she felt the tightening on my belly and pointed it out to me. Since it doesn’t hurt at all, I had just thought that was the baby stretching or something.) Contrast this to one of my sisters who was brought to near tears by her BH contractions for three straight months. So that’s good. And then there’s sleep and how I can still do it. Sometimes I even sleep straight through the night without having to get up to pee at all! This is unheard of in a nine-month pregnant lady, and hoo boy, will I miss it when I suddenly find myself getting up 87 times a night to breastfeed. On the other hand, the sleep I get isn’t particularly refreshing, since when I wake up I’m still completely exhausted*. I think it’s because I can’t roll over, so the mornings after I don’t get up all night, my left side is practically numb from having lain on it all night. Still, I’m sure I will soon look longingly back at these days of sleeping in one position for eight hours because of the EIGHT HOURS part, so I’m trying to savor it.

But I was going to talk about nesting. Really, I was! Check the title! I don’t think I nest as much as some women do; for example, while I did spend two days purging all the old papers from our file cabinets and shipping them off to a shredding service, I did not finish the job and reorganize the remaining files into a sensible system. Nevertheless, there have been several bursts of somewhat odd behavior like how I suddenly primed the back stairwell last month during Jack’s nap. (Don’t tell my mom I did that.) Now that we finally painted our bedroom, the only painting left to do in our house – if you don’t count repainting the bathroom because we accidentally chose a god-awful pink or the living room because it’s been long enough that I’ve gotten sick of it – are the outside pantry and the back stairway. These two are low priority because no one really sees them. Guests see the back stairway if we have a cookout, but for the most part, these areas of the house are closed off and therefore invisible. Still, the stairway had horrible dark blue walls and dark brown wainscoting and trim and did I mention it was dark? Very very dark. A very very dark, dark cave. So we figured we’d use our leftover yellow and white from the kitchen and brighten it up, but, you know, when we got around to it.

Well, I got around to it, or at least to the priming part. I knew I probably wouldn’t finish before the baby comes, but I also figured that even if all I did was prime it, it could not possibly look worse and it would at least be brighter. And I was right, I didn’t finish. Technically, I didn’t even finish priming because there is so much trim and wainscoting, but I was right, it doesn’t look any worse and it is, in fact, much brighter. So I’m calling it a success. I do kind of wonder when we will actually finish it, though. Even though the woodwork is only half primed, it’s the sort of thing that just starts looking normal until you have people over and they say things like, “Oh, are you painting? When did you start?” and you are forced to reply, “Uh… four years ago.”

But my battery is dying and I want to post this now because I am hoping I will be too busy having a baby to post it tomorrow. Fingers crossed!

*Yesterday, I asked Jack how he had slept, and he said “Slept good.” Then I asked him if he felt refreshed, and he said, “And rested!”