Nesting - the bizarro phase

Nesting has started in the Lai household, and man, it's bizarre.

First of all, I am the Queen of Clutter. Seriously, if there are 20 stacks of bills dating back to 2005, I don't really mind that much. I know that I don't throw anything away, so if I need that gift receipt that I need to honour that warranty for the toaster oven we got for my bridal shower, I know it's in the third pile from the right. Receipt for that taco lunch I had during the third week of exam-grading in grad school during 2004? Yup. Got that too. My decluttering must be a sign of nesting, because I have given up on those receipts and have managed to sort and shred various pieces of paper up to 2007, whittling the piles down to just 3 and those 3 piels fit nicely in a cardboard box. At this rate, I'll be caught up by the time the little dude gets here.

These days, I'm also finding that we're making frequent trips to Ikea and Home Depot to get optional things DONE before the baby arrives. For example, when we moved into this house 1.5 years ago, S had repainted the WHOLE interior on his own. 1.5 years is not that long ago, but for some reason, we decided that the largest room in the house, the dining/living room that spans the entire house from front to back, needed to be repainted. And not just repainted. It needed to have a chair rail installed around the room, and the upper half needed to be repainted a lighter colour. So that meant 2 coats of primer and 2 coats of light brown, over half of the chocolate brown wall.

Then, we painted installed chair rails in the baby room and repainted the bottom half for contrast. Baby's room also received a dark brown dresser, a baby-height shelf (we want his toys and belongings at baby-level a la Montessori), a glider and ottoman, various baskets, fantasy and superhero-themed artwork prints, and a dark brown crib. Photos? Sure. One day.

When we had first moved in, the home was a mess. The previous homeowners did almost NO cleaning up, so we had bags and bags of garbage in the garage, and layers of dust and grime to get through before the home was livable. During that moving in phase, the cheapo venetian blinds were quite low on the list of things to get clean. The other day, I noticed just how filthy they were, and S found me on my knees, in bathroom, donning a pair of rubber gloves, and up to my elbows scrubbing the blinds with Mr. Clean and a scouring pad...

...at 3 am.

I was only up that late because the belly was making things hard to get to. I'm sure I would have been done by 1 am if I had started 2 months ago, before the belly was really out there!

So what does this nesting phase mean? Does it mean that at the back (well, it's at the front now) of our minds, we know that life will be crazy when our little guy gets here, and that we won't have time to get to all these house things? I'm not even sure why we decorated his room, since we plan to co-sleep and it's unlikely that we'll move him into a crib in the first year. It must be something in our genetic programming that causes us to feel this overwhelming urge to make a personal space just for our little one. To us, nesting is preparing the household, but really, to the little one, all the nesting space he needs is in his mama's arms!