The routine of a pregnant woman often includes Nesting – preparing the home for the child that’s coming. Oh, my wife and I are expecting our first child. But, that’s not the point of this article. Yes, we’re excited. Yes it was a bit of surprise, but not that much of a surprise. Back to what I was talking about.
Common science says that by the 5th month, women engage in nesting. My wife is different – she started before she even uttered the words “I’m Pregnant” to me at 2 months.
Preparing for baby takes a lot of work for most people – particularly those of us who haven’t been through it before. In all truth, when we built our house, I was thinking children eventually, but I didn’t really consider how soon. When we moved in, things were shoved into corners and generally left to be dealt with later. Clutter and tchotchkes everywhere.
Both the wife and I hate clutter. Babies come with clutter – diapers, strollers, high chairs, toys, clothes, linens, and on and on and on. We’re forced to reconcile how we’re going to deal with all this new clutter before it even happens and deal with the mess we’ve previously left for ourselves.
Guys do it, too. There’s this misconstrued notion that only the woman will nest, when in fact, it’s up to us guys to help out and even direct a few things. In my case, I felt a strong urge to join in the ‘nesting craze’ early on. There’s nothing more frightening than disorganization to me.
I’ve left the garage an absolute horrid mess since the day we moved in here. We’ve spent countless hours postulating over a clean garage with (don’t faint) a car in it! We’ve drawn out plans, even talked about specifics on how to rid ourselves of the worldly goods we’ll never use.
Ultimately, we have come to a point where it’s sink or swim with that damn garage. Either we get it cleaned and ready now or we’ll just have to wait until the nesting instinct comes back around child #2.
I’m not willing to wait. I’ve already started to deal with the smallest items that need to be organized – fasteners, parts, little tools – that stuff. Next, I’ll step up to the medium sized things – keepsakes, chemicals, larger tools. After that, it’s furniture, large tools and anything else. Dump runs, Goodwill donations, selling old stuff – it’s all coming!
Okay, so there’s something else that guys do when they nest. It’s not all about getting the garage cleaned out. Simply put, we start to look at our ability to bring home the bacon. We need money to keep the roof over our heads and food in our baby’s belly. That’s not to say that is how I’m feeling (my job is amazingly excellent!) but I do see quite a few folks I know in my position trying to find ways to ensure the stability of their income for the future.
Guys also find themselves pre-mourning their lives. That is, any notion of social interaction on a regular basis that we had is about to get buried under child-rearing priorities. Not surprisingly, we tend to be a bit unkeen on allowing this. Thus, we try to spend as much time with our soon to be distant friends before the inevitable staying in for 2 weeks on end happens.
The payoff will be there. That’s another blog post, though. With pictures. Promise.
Gregster
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