33 Weeks...

Many women have a certain nesting instinct that kicks in when she's within a few days of labor. I'm not sure how we'll know when I'm about to go into labor, as this entire pregnancy I have had the overwhelming urge to organize...everything.

That's not to say this isn't a tendency I already lean towards. A few days after Jon and I married, I hesitantly showed him his newly organized top dresser drawer and made the firm suggestion that he wear his boxers strictly in the order of the neat pile, top to bottom. He agreed. When we moved to Las Cruces and bought him five identical shirts for work, I asked him to please select the shirt that hung on the leftmost hanger every day. He agreed. When I grew tired of digging through the contents of our freezer to find several half-full bags of corn, I devised an inventory system which required him to indicate each time he used up or opened an item. He agreed.

Enter: pregnancy hormones.

I'm not sure if it's good or bad to have moved in the midst of a pregnancy. Moving to a new house necessitates new habits, new spaces for things, and the mere act of touching every belonging to make the decision about whether it's worthy of the move. I was at once excited about putting away everything, but overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, wanting to do it all perfectly. I was telling Kamy, our midwife, about frantically organizing the spacious pantry Jon built for me, adding that I was planning to make laminated cards indicating the sections: baking, canned goods, snacks. Her response? "As your midwife, I need to tell you to try to let go and lighten up. As your friend, I'm wondering when you can come over and do mine."

I felt a little defensive. After all, organization helps a household run smoothly. Then I caught myself rotating the silverware.

There was the weekend I came up with the new laundry schedule, designed to increase efficiency. There is the new schedule of chores that need to be done once a month- spot clean the furniture on the 1st, the 25th we detail the front porch. There is the 15-minute Blitz every night, where we set a timer and put away all the things we've taken out during the day- or as much as we can in that timeframe. I started obsessively writing down the dates that we begin using toiletry items- for some reason I just have to know how long it takes our household to get through a tube of toothpaste or bottle of lotion. I wanted to start cooking and freezing meals way too soon, so instead I spent a weekend pouring over cookbooks, choosing recipes and making shopping lists, dividing the meals into 6 different cooking sessions, the results of which I'm not completely sure will fit in our freezer. I spent time contemplating how our weekly potluck dinners could be better organized and offered to spearhead the campaign, devising a system where we would draw cards each week to indicate what we should bring the following week. My idea was met with a kind, but extremely mild enthusiasm, and I let it drop.

Early in the pregnancy, Kamy started commenting that I'd become...how shall we say it? A bit more likely to voice negative, snappish sentiments. (One night she and some other friends were over for dinner. After dessert, she opened my dishwasher and bent over to load a fork. "Kamy. Do you think I want someone else to load my dishwasher?!?") A few weeks ago the rest of my friends came to the same consensus, using the word "feisty" to describe my gestationally-induced disposition. My response? "Just be thankful you don't have to live with me!"