I'm warning you

Oh dear. Here’s a link to an old post wherein I gush about the arrival of our first nephew. We now have three nephews and a niece (and soon will have another niece!), and I love them to pieces.

This is meant to serve as a warning that I am going to be insufferable once our own child is born. Is there a word for narcissism when it revolves around your own children?

Parenthood. I think that's the word.

Little Dutch Boy

Saturday night, 11 pm. After dinner, I sat on a footstool and chatted with my husband while he did the dishes. Then I got a rag and a scrubby pad and a cup of hot soapy water and scrubbed the fronts of all the drawers and cupboards in the kitchen where they had gotten filthy from grubby fingerprints and food spills.

I don’t think nesting is about preparing for the arrival of the baby. The baby can’t see well enough when it comes home to notice grimy fingerprints, let alone give a shit. Nesting is about trying to impose a sense of order on your little world when you know it is about to turn upside down. Nesting is putting your finger in the dam.

Statistics is another handy weapon against internal chaos. Six months ago, I was looking for trends in the popularity of baby names to make sure the names we were considering weren’t about to go the way of Emma or Aiden. Tonight I Googled “distribution of actual delivery dates around due dates.” Nobody put that kind of information in any of my birthing books. In case you are interested: it actually does kind of look like a normal distribution if you just look between weeks 38 and 42.

My other recent Googling in search of commiseration: “hospital childbirth class awful”. More on that later.