If You Give A Pregnant Woman A Steam-Cleaner...

She's going to want her wife to steam-clean all the carpets in the house.  Hey, we should start in the living room!  But before we can steam-clean the carpet, we need to shove all our furniture into our combination kitchen/dining room.

While her wife is steaming, the pregnant woman will reconsider the arrangement of the living room furniture.

Once the carpet is dry, she'll want to try out some new furniture scenarios.  But in order to try new things out, it involves moving the television and entertainment unit to a different wall, requiring that the cable for satellite TV be run through a different exterior wall.  Which will require a masonry drill bit.  Which the steam-cleaning wife and the pregnant woman don't own.  Then the lucky father of the pregnant woman gets to come save the day by assisting the pregnant woman in running the new cable through the wall.  Then, the rotten father of the pregnant woman will suggest that in addition to vacuuming, wiping, and zip-tying all the cords at the back of the unit together, she should also cable-staple said zip-tied cord bundles to the back of the unit in accordance with the brickwork-style compartments in the Ikea unit.  Because everyone hates seeing cables behind entertainment units stuffed with electronics and children's DVDs and toys and books.

If the furniture gets rearranged, then all the previous decorations in the living room will need to be altered.  The new space on the walls will of course need new things to occupy them, including MORE photographs than already adorn our home.

And once all that is accomplished, there are of course more rooms to rearrange, redecorate, and steam-clean.


Naturally, I trust you all understand my tongue-in-cheek humor here!  Truthfully, I've found T's new nesting instincts to be rather charming and adorable - likely because I know they aren't here to stay!  I've enjoyed helping out, and I absolutely don't want her doing anything chemical-ish anyway so I'm the first one to volunteer to handle these things.

As I would hope you could tell, nesting has set in for my wonderfully pregnant wife.  Things I don't think I'd ever expect to come from her mouth have been issuing forth at a somewhat alarming pace.  To mention a few:
"I'm really tired of the hard water stains on our dishes.  I think I'll soak the dishes in vinegar and rub the stains off. "
"I feel like I NEED to clean out the junk drawer.  It's driving me crazy."
"Next time most of the silverware is out of the drawer, we should put the plastic divider into the dishwasher."  (This one I actually agree with, lol.)
"The linen closet really needs to be gone through and reorganized.  I think I'll wash everything in there after work tonight."
"Would you mind dusting and then wiping down the ceiling fan blades and housing this weekend?  I really want to balance it better so it STOPS CLICKING ALL THE TIME."
A couple weekends ago I even caught her dusting the fire extinguisher.  (She doesn't seem to appreciate the humor in this that I do.)

To her immense credit, she's been very productive.  She did clean out the junk drawer, she did clean out and reorganize (and label) the shelves of the linen closet.  She's been going through old documents that we tend to neglect by leaving in giant piles and discover again two years later.  Not to mention that she's already washed and put away the baby clothing she received at her surprise work shower in June.  And we've finally cleaned out the cabinet in the kitchen that was devoted to our foster kids - kid dishes, sippy cups, baby food, formula, bibs, meds, you name it.  Haven't even looked in that cabinet in seven months, but now it's been cleaned out and reorganized as well.

The biggest thing left on our list is to clean out the office and create a guest bedroom in its stead.  This is on my To-Do list for this weekend while T handles a huge Catholic youth convention ... I'd rather be me than her this weekend, and that is saying something because the office is a huge undertaking!  Once we can get the guest room going, we'll be able to finish up Ever's room and then we'll be much closer to ready.

Speaking of ready.  I've spent much of my time lately occupying that place of total delight in the idea of meeting my daughter while simultaneously being in denial that she's really going to be here sometime in the next three to seven weeks.  Same old story, right?

In the next couple weeks we'll be doing a casting of T's belly, too, and I'm pretty stoked about that.  Also, my lactation induction protocol is about to change majorly!  I'm stopping the birth control after tomorrow, and beginning to take breastmilk production enhancing herbs and starting to pump.  We'll see in the next couple weeks if we've got any luck!  Let's see, what else... Oh, we took some cute photos!  And T got a new lens for the camera for her birthday, and we're really excited about that.  Photos from the new lens to come soon, hopefully.  Here are the cute ones we took from last weekend to tide you over:

With our dog, Manni!

Knitting Evie's newest beautiful hat.

Caught her stretching - whoa, lookit that belly!