22 April 2015

All the comforts of home

If you’ve been pregnant before, you’ll know that what was previously a perfectly serviceable, even comfortable and pleasant home becomes the Source of All Discontent at some point during the 40 weeks of gestation.  I’m there at the moment, and can barely stand the sight of anything in our condo.  It all infuriates me, from the bed to the stove to the shower. 

What’s funny is I’m not entirely sure why I feel this way about a place that I heretofore considered to be a solid representation of whatever home means to me.  The world of pregnancy websites tells me that I’m “nesting”, a term that of course brings to mind all sorts of birdy imagery.  It just seems as though the magnitude of the clear up and clean out that we need to do before the baby’s arrival is perhaps a bit too much.  Instead of lining a nest carefully and diligently with feathers, I want to rent a dumpster and throw all of our belongings into it. 

Of course we won’t be doing that, and have taken a more selective approach to making sure that we have the right stuff in the right places.  The baby’s crib has arrived, but we won’t be setting it up for real until after my parents have gone home (about two weeks after the baby has made its world debut).  I’ve used the image below as my inspiration for what I’d like the baby’s room to look like eventually – it’s about as non-baby as you can get, but the colours and general sense of room zen are what I’m really going for:


We’re being really choosy about what we buy for the baby, as we don’t have any extra space at all in our 875 square feet of beautiful downtown Toronto.  We’ve agreed that the only necessary home items are this crib, bassinet, bouncy seat, and change pad.  No toys, no random accoutrements – we just don’t have the space.

We’ve cleared out our closets and made room for baby clothes, went through stuff in storage boxes and separated out stuff we think the baby will enjoy, and hidden stuff that we’d rather never be broken or misplaced.  We’ll clean our soft furnishings, move a 1930s dresser in from my parents’ place, find actual bookshelves instead of the makeshift stuff we’ve been using, and maybe then my nesting instincts will be satisfied.  Maybe.  A few extra feathers here and there won’t hurt I guess.  

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