Psycho Nesting

Well, here I am... officially in the last trimester of this lovely adventure called pregnancy. I am just about 30 weeks (rounding up, of course) and I no longer can form anything except simple sentences, I'm farting like a frat guy (or Alpha girl hah), and there are only two things on my mind at all times: Eating and cleaning. If I'm eating.... which there's a good chance I am, then I'm thinking about cleaning... and if I'm cleaning, well, I'm usually eating at the same time. The eating, I'm telling myself, is completely fine.... it's not ME with the insatiable appetite for sugar coated sugar, it's the baby, and the cleaning is just part of the amazing phenomenon called, "nesting." Anyone who has had the pleasure of living with a woman in her third trimester of pregnancy knows that the nesting instinct is both a blessing and a curse. All of the sudden, you have this uncontrollable urge to clean, disinfect, and organize all at the same time and often times, this urge takes priority over everything.... including your basic needs, like sleep (not so much the eating, tnough). At first, you're cleaning normal things and your spouse might think... "hey, this is great!" The dishes are always done, there's no clutter on the kitchen table, the laundry is neatly folded... but slowly (or very abruptly) the urge takes on a life of it's own and you start to clean between the tiles on the bathroom floor with a q-tip or the air vent at the bottom of the refrigerator. You skip movie nights with your hubby to clean and disinfect every cabinet knob in the house and even an opportunity for a foot rub won't make you stop wiping the base boards. Organization also becomes an obsession and simply neatly stacking the towels in the linen closet will no longer do... oh, no no no.... they must now be folded EXACTLY the same way with the same edge on each towel facing out and be color coordinated, of course. Every project or craft that you have ever started or thought about must now be finished... for me it included printing out 500+ digital photos and organizing them, chronologically, in albums sorted by event or finishing Ali's baby book which I let sit on the shelf for the last 18 months. Also on my list is to paint a scene on Ali's wall... a design on the bathroom door, and refinish a table.

Now, I'm wondering how linen closet organization and refrigerator vent cleaning made it through evolution to our modern day genetic make-up..... because, I'm pretty sure that neither of those things will improve the life of my future child. I get that you're supposed to be "building your nest" in preparation for the baby's arrival, so that everything is all set and you can dedicate 100% of your attention to the baby and not anything else, but it seems to me that somewhere along the line, there must have been a genetic mutation and this nesting instinct got a little out of control. If I don't normally clean the air vent at the bottom of the fridge, then why are my instincts forcing me to do it now?? It gets a little ridiculous when you can't even drive down the road without thinking about cleaning out the bathroom drain. Now, if only I could bottle up the chemical inside my head that makes me the psycho cleaner and sell it on the street to lazy people and maid services,..... I'd be rich! Also, I wouldn't mind it in smaller doses... like, when I just need to get the laundry put away, I could take one dose and when I need to clean the entire house, I could take 2 or 3 doses.

It's pretty amazing the things our body is preprogrammed to do...things that we never learned or even knew about. It's pretty funny to see the way these things are expressed in modern day life. I'm sure that nesting had a whole different way of expressing itself in the cave women. But who knows, maybe they were thinking the same thing while they cleaned obsessively.... except instead of the refrigerator vent it was the crevices in the cave walls.

Okay, the eyes are shutting... off to dream of M&M's for dinner and clorox disinfecting wipes. Happy cleaning, pregos!