It’s been almost a month since I last blogged. A lot has happened. There was the Great Fall of 2012, the three-hour stay in the hospital, our first “HOLY CRAP BABY IS COMING NOW” scare, a couple baby showers and lots of baby gadgets that are now assembled. The curtains in the nursery have been hung, her swing is built and we finally got a lamp in the nursery, meaning that Susan’s room is now officially finished and ready for her to move in.
Mary is now nine months pregnant. She’s having contractions like crazy (“Like Crazy” is medically defined as “a shitload”). The doctors, several of them since we’ve been to about 72 unscheduled appointments in the past two weeks, all say that they aren’t real contractions, only practice contractions. Her entire belly gets as hard as a rock for about 20-30 seconds, sometimes accompanied by a shooting pain that Mary describes sometimes as “pressure” and other times as “MAN this hurts.”
The doctors, of which we’ve seen at least four recently, told us those contractions are Mary’s body’s way of preparing itself to give birth. Her uterus has to warm up before real labor like Mariano Rivera has to warm up before he cleans up the mess that A.J. Burnett left behind in the ninth inning. The only problem is that Mariano has been bailing out the Yankees for over a decade, and my wife’s uterus is just now getting started. It’s obviously new at this because the contractions are all over the place in timing and intensity, and not much is getting done. “Inefficient” is the word they’ve been using. Maybe it’s more like Burnett than Rivera after all.
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| If Mary's uterus had a face right now. |
We have another appointment on Thursday, and Mary has sworn that if she’s not dilated yet and these contractions have been for nothing, she’s going to go Pregzilla on anything in her path. I feel her pain (figuratively, not literally) because the waiting has been brutal. We both want Susan to hurry up and get here, but we’re now at the mercy of our unborn daughter as to when she wants to make her debut. She’s not even here yet and is already treating us like her pawns.
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| Your move, baby. |
Mary has recently started passing the time by cleaning the house and organizing Susan’s room over and over again. I woke up one morning to find her folding sheets in the upstairs linen closet…at 6 AM...on a Tuesday. I thought that was strange, but was still waking up so I didn’t inquire. Thirty minutes later when she didn’t come downstairs, I went up there to find her folding Susan’s clothes…clothes that were already folded. She had a huge smile on her face and was moving around like Speedy Gonzales on speed. The ensuing conversation went something like this:
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Folding her clothes!” she said.
“It's 6:30 morning?” I said.
“Yeah, come look! Ok so I was thinking this would be her coming-home outfit…and this one she can wear in the hospital…and this one would be so cute at the beach…and THIS one, awwww SO cute. So I have her little onesies here in this drawer organized by color and material. And then HERE are her socks…these are like newborn socks, and she probably won’t fit into these, so I put them on this side…but THESE will be great! I don’t want her little feet to get cold. And then the hats are up here – which one do you like the best? I think this one’s my favorite. Oh and I organized her closet. Come look – her summer outfits are on the left…”
…and so on. In my first 30 minutes that morning, I drank half a cup of coffee and read three paragraphs of the sports page. My wife, who apparently launched herself out of bed at 4 a.m. like Usain Bolt out of the starting block, had already organized and re-organized the entire nursery running on nothing but pregnancy hormones.
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| Pregnancy: The ultimate PED. |
Come to find out, there’s something called the “nesting instinct” that most pregnant women experience at various stages of pregnancy. I consulted the internet, and it had this to say:
At the end of pregnancy, the "nesting" instinct can set in. This is an uncontrollable urge to clean one's house brought on by a desire to prepare a nest for the new baby, to tie up loose ends of old projects and to organize your world. Females of the animal kingdom are all equipped with this same need. It is a primal instinct. Just as you see birds making their nests, mothers-to-be do exactly the same thing.
The cause of the nesting instinct is both physical and emotional. A woman’s hormones during pregnancy are responsible for the most of the nesting instinct, and residual survival instinct is responsible for the rest. The nesting instinct can be observed in all pregnant mammals as they prepare for birth.
Source: The Internet
After watching my wife labor up stairs for eight months and fall asleep before 9 p.m. every night, I thought nesting had bypassed her this time around. Not the case. Since the first morning of nesting a week ago, she’s spent more time in the nursery than any other room in the house. She washed every single piece of clothing that Susan has and has sterilized all of her bottles twice. I’ve helped out a bit, but she hasn’t asked me to do any of this because I think she enjoys it that much. I feel like I should be doing something, but I usually end up just standing there while she folds and irons tiny dresses.
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