Nesting.

08 April 2002

We've been very busy getting ready for Mini Moo lately. The past week was spent cleaning and painting the nursery. Here's a tip: don't buy a house which has rough-cut beams going around and across the ceilings, if you ever think you might paint them. The beams in Mini's room went from Mission Brown (a good old yukky standard) to white, to match the ceiling itself. It took three coats, with a big hairy roller, and lots of corner work with the brush. Fun! Not. We decided the beams better be white, not only because it would lighten the whole room, but mostly because brown beams would look awful with the new wall colour, which is called "Spanky" (picture a team of trendy twentysomethings in a back room brainstorming hip and happening names for paint colours). "Spanky" is actually a shade of light blue. No comment on boy/girl stereotypes here, OK? I still haven't mentioned anywhere in this journal which variety Mini Moo is. And no comments about my poor grammar with dangling whatnots and split thingamadoos and the like.

Saturday we went shopping, and ended up buying all sorts of baby-friendly furniture (defined as "having drawers and cabinets which we can close and put locks on", and also "having lots of drawers which we can put truckloads of baby stuff in"). The old TV cart with the broken glass door gets the heave-ho, as does the old coffee table with its small, overcrowded, attractive-to-small-people shelf full of magazines and pens and remote controls and who knows what else. We get a new entertainment centre with lots of cabinets and drawers and a swanky big coffee table with big drawers and casters, no less. For the bedrooms we got some new chests of drawers with lots and lots of space which I'm sure will be too small by mid-July. We even bought a new rug for the lounge room, nice and soft and clean with a border full of colour and design which little babies can play on. It will probably start looking like the old, tattered, frayed, dirty rug in about three weeks.

We're even getting a new front fence. Well, the old one is about to fall down so we'd have to get one even if Mini Moo wasn't in the picture. But the best bit is the automatic remote gate we're including, so we can be reallllly lazy and push a button and drive the car straight in without having to get out and open the gate by hand and be distracted from all our wonderful thoughts about the good old days with a real disposable income, before we decided to build this nest. But really, it's worth it (so they tell me)... and I can't wait to meet Mini Moo.

Yesterday we spent six hours in an intensive pre-natal workshop class. We decided to risk information overload and get it all done in a single day (better than driving to the hospital every Wednesday night for a month). I thought it was actually fun, except for the part where we had to watch a video of this poor woman being given an episiotomy (if you don't know what that is, try a Google search and brace yourself if squeamish). We learned all about the stages of labour, types of pain relief (yes, please), scary things about what can go wrong and what the doctors do in each case, how to tell when labour starts, etc. etc. etc. The two things I wanted to learn which they wouldn't tell me are, How do I support Lisa without getting into trouble (I think the answer is "I can't", especially during the "transition" phase of labour), and How do I keep myself from fainting?

Mini Moo rocks!