Is it ever a good plan for this pregnant woman to balance on tiptoe on a step ladder, trying to reach the ceiling?
I suspect you know the answer to that.
Does this mean I actually stay off the step ladder?
I… suspect you know the answer to that, too.
Nesting is one of my favorite side effects of pregnancy. (Given that it’s competing with, like, all-day nausea and sciatic nerve pain, this may not be saying much.)
What, other than nesting, could posses a person to dust the doors of the kitchen cabinets, then progress to scrubbing the cabinet faces, scouring the fronts of all the appliances, and searching the internet for suggestions on cleaning the inside of a microwave? Assuming that person generally pretends never to have heard of things like “spring cleaning”?
That same person might take a sponge to all the baseboards, purge two grocery bags’ worth of worn-out old towels, and organize all the bookshelves by color. They might even break out the pole we use to paint the vaulted ceilings, and use it to de-cobweb the entire house. If they were nesting.
(We own more cobwebs than socks, by volume. The spiders can spin those webs, though, and I can’t even knit, so I feel like they have an unfair advantage.)
At no other time in my life do I have both the motivation and the absurd amount of energy needed to do all those things at once. Or even one of those things at once.
I mean, sure, I forgot to eat lunch, and when I was finished scrubbing it was six o’clock and we still had to, you know, make dinner, and the next day I wouldn’t be able to use my arms because: sore.
Even so.
Nesting is awesome.
Which brings us back to the step ladder.
A lamp needed replacing.
If you are a normal, not-pregnant person, like my husband, your thought process goes something like this: Buy lamp. Hang lamp. Be done with lamp and never think about it again until the bulbs burn out.
If you are me, and you are in the must-get-house-ready-for-baby phase of pregnancy, the thought process is more like this: Okay, we have two pink lanterns here. They’re kind of plain. Hmm. I think all we need to do is hit up the craft store for tissue paper and cardstock, assemble three paper poufs, sew the cardstock into a very glittery garland, and then we’ll have a respectable light fixture!
So you can see why I was the one on the step ladder hanging the pouf-garland-lantern concoction.
Keep in mind that it’s important to do these kinds of things during pregnancy, because babies will not agree to be born in houses with scuffed baseboards or boring lamps. That’s just common sense.
And yet, as my husband lunged to catch the step ladder for the fifteenth time to keep me from plummeting to my doom, I had to wonder whether nesting—at least Extreme Nesting, the kind that involves skipping meals and/or climbing things—isn’t a sort of survival-of-the-fittest mechanism, designed to weed out the idiots before they can take charge of a helpless newborn.
It is clearly an imperfect process, since I am still here and awaiting newborn number six.
Still. It seems like a possibility.
