Maybe I am just recovering from a two week vacation, but after about a month of energy, I find myself so tired I may as well be back in the first trimester. This is the first pregnancy I have hit such a strong wall of fatigue before around 34 weeks. Um...maybe I need to give myself a 7:30 pm bedtime? Realistically, there has to be a way to fight this.
I am trying to distract myself with things I want to accomplish before I have this baby. Challenge number one is closet and dresser space. Organizing four kids clothing and toys has been interesting. I have my two older kids sharing a dresser and a closet and my two younger kids sharing a dresser and a closet. This has worked well so far, but no there is not any more space. We may just have to get another dresser or something.
This is where shopping crazy hormones kick into overdrive. One starts pricing dressers and finds that she has begun to look at cribs and nursery design. We don't have room in our house for this stuff, but every pregnancy I find myself doing the same thing. It feel like we are not prepared for a baby. Silly, since we have managed to be just prepared enough for four so far. How did one dresser suddenly become decorating an imaginary room that we do not really have or need? Mommy drive is funny like this.
At the same time as wanting to add to our stuff...I started to figure out how much junk we could consider getting rid of. If I had not been pregnant so many times, maybe I would never clean the garage? Pregnancy does have its advantages when it comes to spring cleaning and forcing oneself to give up pack rat tendencies. If only I could part with some of my childhood toys? I was the kind of kid that insisted on keeping everything. I never understood why my mother wanted to get rid of my toys. Now I know what she means. How many stuffed animals do we need before a whole room is just full of them? What is the best strategy for organizing toys in a three bedroom house where one doesn't want the living area to basically become a glorified playroom, but insists that the bedrooms remain sleeping spaces?
If I put toys in the bedrooms, my kids would never go to bed. This is a problem. My latest idea? place a shelf in our almost too narrow hallway. It has worked so far. The toys are not in a bedroom or a living room. We can make our living room guest friendly and the kids can play in the living room or their bedrooms. Clean up has become a daily part of our routine and it is easy to keep track of since all the toys go in one place. So far so good. We cannot own every fun toy known to man, but the kids are still having tons of fun.
We really will need to purchase a dresser of some kind for this new baby, but other than that we are set. I have tons of baby clothes and all the gear. It is so easy to feel a sense of panic because having a baby tends to make me want to buy lots of things (I am not a big shopper otherwise). Lets face it, playing house never really ends. Does a new baby need me to paint all the walls and decorate the house perfectly? Not really, but somehow it feels necessary. Does my new baby care if my outdoor veggie garden is as impressive as last year? Considering all he or she will care about for six months is breast milk, I will just have to try harder next summer. Hehe. I wish I could laugh at myself more.
There is always more one can buy or change before a new baby, but at this point, I just need to focus on basic needs. God has always provided just enough for our kids and this time will be the same.
We are keeping the baby in our room for the first 4 or 6 months just like we did with the other two. But, with the other two, I still had the nurseries competely decorated and arranged before the baby got here. So, we have decided that we'll turn the guest bedroom into the nursery after the first of the year, but it's driving me crazy because I just want the room to be prepared before the baby is here.
ReplyDelete