nesting

They say pregnant women have a extra strong "nesting" instinct, involving serious cleaning and organizing of various parts of their home. It is supposed to be strongest just before you giving birth - perhaps a sign that it is close.

I read this in Vicki Iovine's The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy:

A couple of days before you go into labor, you may feel an irresistible urge to clean your hosue or defrost your refrigerator or put all your CDs in alphabetical order or some other such anal task. I am not talking about the normal panicky cleaning fits some of us fall into when our mother calls and says she is stopping by unexpectedly, or the way you finally get around to putting the broken toilet paper dispenser back on the wall because your brother and his new wife and coming to stay for the weekend. No, I am talking about the kind of feverish cleaning where you use your husband's toothbrush to scour the pipe that goes from the back of your toilet into the wall. I'm talking about taking every switchplate cover in the house and soaking them all in Pine Sol. This is the time when otherwise rational women truly believe that they cannot sleep for one more night in a house where the baseboards have not been freshly painted. This is nature's way of making sure you will be ready for the new baby, and it is called "nesting."

A week after her due date...my Girlfriend Mindy was discovered by her mother tottering at the top of her six-foot ladder, feverishly sponging down the shelves at the top of her closets. To indicate how out of character this was, I have to tell you that Mindy's "baby" is now seven years old, and that those shelves have never seen a sponge since....

My Girlfriend Sondra starting cooking as she neared her delivery date. She calmly and rationally explained that she just wanted to have a few meals frozen so that her husband could microwave them when she was in the hospital and when she first got home. It made sense, until I saw Sondra's car in the grocery store parking lot at 7:00am waiting for it to open. She made so many casseroles that she filled her own freezer and soon spread out to her Girlfriend's across the street.....

I'm not close to my due date, and I don't think I'm close to the irrationality in the above stories, but I had a spurt of organizational projects this last week. I have always enjoyed deep cleaning and re-organizing. I love making things look nice. I can remember as a small child taking great delight in ordering my dad's screws into the correct coffee cans.

I was thinking about that on Friday as I sorted the tool box at school.

This is the third re-organization project I took on last, as the end-of-school-term craziness has quieted down.

I started out asking a question about a field trip, and ended up taking on the task of organizing old field trip information and brochures into beautiful binders.

But in order to do that project, I needed plastic sheet protectors. I couldn't readily find them in the cabinet, and as I was shifting through the supplies, I realized it needed an overhaul. I don't know how many times it's been re-organized by very competent, organized people who piled and labeled until they were blue in the face. But all the slippery office supplies come sliding together, and staff in a hurry don't always put things back where they belong. It needed a serious overhaul, a brand new scheme. The empty mailboxes spoke to me: these trays would be just the thing.

Several hours later, with the help of Jarka, I had it beautiful.

Friday afternoon I came home, emptied the dishwasher, and tried to stuff the darn tupperware into the darn tupperware drawer. Too full. I promptly sat down and re-arranged until it all fit in this beautiful fashion.

Naturally if you could have seen the state of disorder these things were in to begin with, you might better appreciate all these photos. Alas, I don't have a "before" shot. But still, hopefully this captures the essence of my excitement in these projects.