guest post: nesting

By Mixed Nuts

To understand where I’m coming from, you first need to know who I am. My name is Katie. I am the 30-year-old mother of a 4 1/2-year-old son, N~, a 3-year-old son, W~, and a 21-month-old son, C~. Oh yeah, and I’m pregnant again. With another boy. Due in February.

I love watching about-to-become-first-time moms. The excitement. The anticipation. The PLANNING. Part of me watches with awe (I’ve never been extremely organized), and part of me smiles to myself. I see the lists being made, then dutifully checked off. I watch as baby items are researched, bought, returned, and replaced. Some women reach a point of panic where even the smallest choices appear to them to be a predictor of whether or not they will be a failure as a mother (years ago, I witnessed one pregnant woman have a slight freak-out over her inability to keep a Chia Pet alive, feeling this couldn’t bode well for her future parenting skills).

I never experienced this.

Not because I’m just that enlightened, or anything like that. You see, my first son was adopted. I spent four years doing the freak out about fertility tests, adoption issues, and stuff like that. After all, once an adoption homestudy is completed, you usually have several months–sometimes even years–of waiting. I could do the reading and researching then. Six weeks after my homestudy was turned in (way too soon to be worrying about nesting), we were chosen by N’s birthmother. Exactly one week later, we were parents.

That was a busy week. My free time was spent getting as much as possible, from whoever could ship it the fastest. I put together a basic baby wardrobe, bought a crib, got a diaper bag and everything to fill it, and was blessed with gifts of a car seat, stroller, pack-and-play, a bassinet, a full-sized swing, a travel swing, and baby monitors. You know–the basics. Three weeks after N’s birth, a baby shower really stocked us up.

By the time I became pregnant with W~, I was past the point of researching which nursery items would be best–I already had them all. And after a quick perusal of my sorted and saved baby clothes, W’s wardrobe was all set. So I threw myself fully into preparation for childbirth (since this was, after all, a miracle pregnancy that would NEVER happen again). I took classes. I read books. I listened to tapes. I checked into the hospital with more stuff than Sean and I could carry in one trip: pillow, blankets, relaxation music, unscented oil, essential oils, focal points, socks full of barley–you get the idea. Thirty-one hours of labor, and I didn’t use any of it.

I look back now, and very distinctly remember a conversation I had with Sean a couple of days before my third son, C~, was born. “I went to Target today and bought a package of newborn rompers,” I told him. “So, the baby will at least have something to wear home if I don’t get around to sorting through the baby clothes before I go into labor.” Seriously. That, and a package of newborn diapers, was about the extent of my baby preparation.

So where does that leave me now that I’m preparing for child number four? A few months ago, Sean was cleaning out our storage room. “Dear,” he said, “what do you think of getting rid of these?” He motioned to our bassinet and baby swing. I reminded him that I was, at that very moment, in the process of creating their next occupant. He was amazingly unswayed by this argument, but I’ve managed to keep them from heading out the door so far.

And all of those “necessities” that I scrambled to get in time for N’s birth? Honestly, Sean is kind of right about the bassinet and big baby swing–we barely used them (although the travel swing is AWESOME). We got rid of our crib when C~ was only a few months old–none of our kids ever slept in it. My older children refer to the pack-and-play as the “baby cage” since the only purpose it serves is a time-out spot for their younger brother (assuming it isn’t full of stuff I don’t want them to get into). I’m not sure where the power cords are for the baby monitor, but C~ likes pretending they are telephones. The sweat sock full of barley, however, has stood the test of time. Two minutes and forty seconds in the microwave, and that sucker can do more for my back pain than just about anything else.

In the first days and months after becoming a parent, you learn something amazing. No matter how much you researched, no matter how much you planned, you weren’t ready. And no amount of purchased gadgets could have gotten you there. Sure, that stuff is fun–some of it is even useful. But the true measure of motherhood comes after the weeks of sleepless nights, when your brain is too toasted to even begin to make lists and plans, yet you finally figure out what THAT cry means. And then you know that no amount of lavender scented baby bath or Egyptian cotton crib sheets could ever comfort your child a fraction as well as just being near you. Because that’s all he really needed.