Nesting is a Chick Thing

Eight pregnancies, one miscarriage and seven lively, happy children make for an interesting life and many stories. During my each of my pregnancies I have been known to crave strange things, but during my madwoman nesting phases the stories are even more bizarre.

During the pregnancy with my first daughter, I had the feeling that nothing was clean enough. I worked full time and went to school part time, but during my spare time I was found sitting in closets scrubbing the walls and the baseboards. The bathrooms were another area that I targeted daily. Our bathrooms were tiled two-thirds of the way up the wall and three-fourths the way up the wall in the shower. Using a special toothbrush, I scrubbed all the grout with cleanser and bleach water. In addition, the entire house received a thorough cleaning and mopping each day. No one liked to visit me because I put them to work with me.

There was little time for obsessive scrubbing with my second pregnancy as my husband was away in Boot Camp and I had a toddler to care for full-time. I also bought our first home and moved us in my eighth month of pregnancy. The house had more than the average amount of trees on the property for its size. Ten trees on our property lined the busy road we lived on and the house was on a corner lot. The overgrown trees had branches hanging into the road, taking up two-thirds of the second lane. The house was previously owned by a bachelor who had a dog and I don’t think he ever deep cleaned the house the entire time he lived there. Too tired to clean house, I had the real estate company hire someone to clean it before we moved in.

Cleaning was out of the way and all I could concentrate on late at night was chopping the branches off the ten massive trees. Just imagining it wasn’t enough and I was not about to wait for my husband to come home in three months to do it. I called my doula up two nights in a row telling her my obsession with the trees. The Texas heat that summer was almost unbearable as it stayed a sweltering 115 degrees on a daily basis. Nothing was going to stop me, though- nothing. I bought a large manual branch trimmer and spent hours cutting branches, reaching up with my short five foot, one inch body. I got half way finished with the line of trees and looked around me at the piles of large branches needing to be hauled into a pile and out of the street. I couldn’t do it because at that point, I couldn’t move another muscle. My dad and my sisters came to my rescue and pleaded with me to stop trimming trees as I was almost nine months pregnant. No way, Hosea! I wasn’t finished yet.

That night, I called my doula again and shared with her my woes of the unfinished project and how it was just eating at me. The next afternoon I was at it again until I finished. My dad and sisters came over again and helped me even though they thought I was completely insane. I refused all offers for my dad to do it for me. It is what I wanted to do and I wasn’t about to share my project. I used to wonder why my daughter kept flipping in my stomach just days before she was born. Tree trimming, maybe? Thankfully she ended up in the right position for me to give birth naturally.

The trees were done and the housecleaning was covered thanks to help from my friends and family during the last month and a half of my third pregnancy. I spent a month on bed-rest due to early dilation and threats of my young man wanting to come into the world too soon. He didn’t come early. In fact, he came a week late and was born in the car, but that is another story.

It was the holiday season and I was in the mood for cookies. I received the green light to be on my feet so I started baking one sunny afternoon. I kept baking cookies and baking cookies and baking cookies. I filled the entire kitchen with cookies of every kind. No counter, tabletop or empty surface was left uncovered. My family dropped in to visit around the same time my husband came home from work. They couldn’t believe their eyes. “Why, this many cookies?” they kept asking. I couldn’t say; I just wanted a lot of cookies. My husband called some friends over and even they were dumbfounded with how many cookies I made for no “reason”. I had a reason. I was nesting! A few weeks later I gave birth to our third child and only son. We didn’t have any cookies left to enjoy at the birth. Sigh. I just bought a “birthday cake” instead. Another thing my husband just didn’t understand.

Women tend to get the nesting urge to prepare their home for the arrival of the new baby. It gives them extra energy and some women are very productive during this time. I too, am very productive while pregnant and nesting. I’m also good at cracking the whip for the family to help me. All this productivity does tend to inspire me to do some unusual things and my loved ones still laugh at me during some of the more bizarre nesting moments. What can a girl say? Nesting, it’s a chick thing. You wouldn’t understand!