Nesting, Nesting ... 1-2-3 ...

Once I accepted that the incredible drive I was feeling to Get Things Done was nesting, I began to see its influence everywhere. The odd thing is that very few of the nesting tasks I am performing actually have anything directly to do with the baby. There's a good reason for that: my sister Sara has provided me with a large amount of hand-me-downs, from the large furniture department (baby swing, high chair) all the way down to the small garments department (lots of baby onesies and sleepers) and including many other items along the way (crib mobile, Snugli, baby sling, baby bath tub). She is also going to give me her old crib/change table combo sometime in May or June. Since I won't need the crib until around that time anyway - thanks to the family heirloom cradle the baby will be sleeping in - that works out perfectly.

So, I don't have any major shopping to do for baby. I have to go buy a whole bunch of consumables - diapers, blankets, wipes, and whatever other stuff the layette lists insist I need - but I'm waiting for my mom to come and do that with me, which won't happen until March sometime. In the meantime, what to do with the niggling anxieties which won't let me sit still?

Well, I seem to have found one or two things.

Let's start with these napkins. (Mostly because this is the order Blogger loaded the pictures in and I have no idea how to rearrange them.) People give me funky, themed paper napkins as gifts all the time, and they are rarely used because they are Evil to the Environment. But now, for the first time, the entirety of their Evil is organized neatly into a basket instead of the various packages of Evil being strewn about the main floor of the house in whatever cupboard, drawer, or shelf I happened to throw them into.



Then for reasons known only to Blogger we jump up to the top floor and into the actual nursery. Here you can see the closet organizer we bought last May and finally got around to assembling, oh, this past weekend. Stacked on the organizer are the boxes of baby clothes and other hand-me-downs from my sister. The hope chest in front of the closet is exactly where the crib will eventually go. Please don't ask me where the hope chest is going to go, because I have no idea.



This is the view of the cupboard under the sink in the half-bath downstairs. Isn't it tidy?



Same view, different bathroom. The work of an obsessive mind.


(BTW, this is the floor that is due to be replaced next weekend.)



This is the closet in the laundry room. Note that the chemicals are all on the top shelf, to dissuade a toddler who won't be toddling for at least 12 more months not to drink them.





The previous two pictures show the cupboards in the laundry room. Unfortunately I didn't think of doing this post until after we'd already tidied and organized them, so I can't show you a "Before" picture, but I can assure you it was nothing like this.



The linen closet upstairs. Just looking at this picture makes me happy.



It's kind of hard to see in the small image, but this is the top of our media centre, and on the right-hand side is a small wicker basket I bought for the express purpose of holding whatever various movies/CDs we are working our way through at the moment. As you can see, Chris takes great pleasure in putting the movies right next to the basket instead of inside, the better to drive me up the frigging wall.



Oh look, we're back in the nursery again! (Thanks, Blogger, for the most random tour in the world.) Here's another picture of the nifty closet organizer. The box promised it could be put together in minutes - it took us about eight months.



The coffee table, with its newly-purchased seagrass baskets for holding various collections of stuff that seems to collect there.



The dining room table. Two nesting-fuelled purchases here: the Asian-inspired placemats, and the small wicker basket to hold our non-Evil-to-the-environment cloth napkins.



This glider is the sole piece of furniture in the nursery that is exactly where it is going to remain. It gave great peace to my soul to be able to put it there. Not shown: the cradle that is to be moved into our room, the crib and change table that won't arrive until May, the desk and hope chest that have to be moved to some other location, and the Laura who is desperately trying to figure out where that location is.

Finally, the hutch in the kitchen. For the first time since we moved - hell, for the first time since we moved in together at all, 3 years ago - the hutch is organized, purged of unnecessary items, and arranged with an eye to aesthetic appeal and functionality. I'm sure the baby will greatly appreciate it.

So, yeah, most of the things I've been madly nesting over have little direct impact on preparing for the baby. But indirectly, I can (and do) rationalize that I'm getting all these things done now because I know soon I will have absolutely no time, energy, or interest to devote to them. The same can be said of the mundane organizing tasks I'm taking on at work: knowing that someone else will be doing my job while I'm on leave, I'm trying to leave things more tidy and organized than they have been thus far.