Saturday, September 12, 2009

Nesting

I made up a poem.
Nesting, oh, nesting
I hate you, you stink
I wish I could wash you away in the sink.
Okay, I stole a good portion of that from the poem Homework. For some reason my nesting instinct that tends to strike all mothers in the final days of pregnancy hits me early. Last time I was 29 weeks along. This time, again, I was 29 weeks. I am currently 30 for those of you who like to keep up on this kind of thing. For Ethan, at 29 weeks I started buying everything I thought I needed and set up the room. It took several weeks, and then the cleaning started. We were living in our apartment in Seattle so there was really only so much cleaning to be done so when I finished all the usual cleaning I would sit and stare around and try to figure out what I should clean next. Cleaning the blinds was my focus project. I spent hours at a time, which turned into days of cleaning those stupid blinds. I would scrub and scrub, then dry, and then stand back and examine my work. It was never good enough. I finally stopped when my arms and back hurt too much to continue. Blinds 1, Beth 0. I don't think I ever bothered to clean them again after that. Last week I spent an hour and a half scrubbing my kitchen. I always spend a lot of time on the counter tops because it is hard to tell if they are clean because of the color. I clean them and then feel them with my hand. Again, never clean enough. I scrubbed the cabinets, the handles, the refrigerator, cleaned out the refrigerator and cabinets of old food, cleaned the dishwasher, scrubbed the sink, and then Ethan needed to eat lunch and take a nap so I stopped. I was also on a smell rampage. I smell pee all the time. Baby pee, dog pee, its everywhere. I was determined to exterminate it. Nathan went to the store to buy air freshner to stop my frenzy. This week I have the carpet cleaners scheduled for Tuesday to get rid of it in the carpet and I bought baby gates to keep Piper out of the carpeted areas for the rest of her existence. The thing is, I hate cleaning. I am not one of those people that enjoys it and gets satisfaction from it. My problem is, I like it clean, and my cleaning is never good enough for me so it consumes me. It concerns me that I have 10 weeks approximately of pregnancy left and a lot more square footage to live in than the last time I was pregnant and I worry about my obsessive compulsive nesting taking over or that I will clean it and it won't stay that way because I have a messy one-year old now. So I hate nesting. I wish I could live in ignorant bliss of dust, mold, and pee smells.