The storm before the calm

In the weeks before Ezekiel was born, I kept texting my friend Nancy about my absolute certainty that the baby would never come. It's easier to decide to believe this, rather than to get your hopes up for an early birth, but in this case it was also sincere: I just wasn't ready to admit that the summer was already over and everything was going to change so soon.

However, practically the very moment we got home from our Solar Eclipse trip, I decided that I couldn't live with our laundry room for another day. We'd been meaning to do something about it for years. Saving money and getting bids and thinking about shelving. But suddenly none of these hypotheticals was enough. Even clean, the room was a depressing hodge-podge of school supplies and cleaning supplies and rock collections and allergy medicine and piles of stuff to take to D.I., and it's a very small room. Lately whenever I added actual laundry to the mix, I had been shedding actual tears of frustration. Behold:

So, that next day, I took Abe with me to IKEA (which turned out to be a good move, as he has no patience for dithering, and didn't let me second- and third- and forth-guess myself into total paralysis, as Sam would considerately have done) and we bought a vast array of cabinets and shelves. So many, in fact, that we had to wait for some time while the employees gathered everything up for us, and I had to take Abe away to an appointment and go back with Seb and Malachi to help me load everything into the van.

As they were loading it all, I was terribly afraid it wouldn't fit, but it did—just.

When we got home, everyone wanted to help carry things inside, so luckily there were boxes of all sizes to be carried!

And then, naturally, I had to text Nancy again to dissect every aspect of this oh-so-obvious "nesting" behavior and what it meant. Was it "true" nesting, foreshadowing an imminent baby? Was laundry room reorganization indeed "nest-like" enough to qualify? Shouldn't it have been something more baby-related, like getting out boxes of baby clothes? So was it simply false nesting, not instinct-driven at all but simply the desperate grasping for order of a disordered mind? I wasn't sure which I wanted it to be, since both options (have the baby I felt totally unprepared for/stay pregnant forever) seemed completely overwhelming. Nancy, reassuringly, produced anecdotal data showing that laundry-room-related nesting led to baby-having 100% of the time. I decided I DID want that to be true…as long as everything got FINISHED first!

The next day, Sam was flying off to California for a workshop—just for one day, thankfully. While Seb and I drove him to the airport, Abe and the girls cleared everything out of the laundry room and distributed it in piles throughout the house. It had to be done, but it was terrible, because then everywhere looked like the picture above!

And as I was driving home my friend Andrea called and said, "Can I come help you clean your house before the baby comes?"

Well…yes! I couldn't believe she would drive an hour and a half just to do that for ME! With her eight children in tow! And I'm sure her heart failed her when she saw the state of the house. "Did you just move in?" her kids asked. 

So, while Abe and Seb deciphered IKEA instruction booklets and built cabinets, Andrea and I (and assorted children) cleaned and cleaned. Mostly Andrea. She was on her knees scrubbing floors! And dusting, and washing walls, and scouring pantry shelves. I felt galvanized into further action by her energy, and found it within myself to clean and organize the pantry, which never usually happens until the night before Thanksgiving (which for some reason is similarly galvanizing).

A clean pantry is a thing of beauty.

It was sadly unsatisfying for Andrea, because we didn't ever get to the "sit back and admire our good work" stage that day, and she had to leave, but I promised to send her pictures later so she could sigh with contentment and see that her work had indeed made a difference. ALL the difference.

Living room. Clean again! Ahhhh.

And let's put up this picture of the pre-cabinet laundry room again, so you can appreciate the contrast. Before:

And after. O blessed clean and calming white surfaces!

I don't know if I can adequately convey how much work Abe and Seb did, building all these cabinets. We worked for about three days, basically nonstop. Malachi and I built several of the drawers, and Sam did a ton of work when he got home from his trip, getting the cabinets anchored and leveled. But the vast majority of the hard lifting and building (and making mistakes, and hurling the instructions across the room while cursing Sweden and everything in it, and un-building and trying again—as one does with IKEA furniture) was done by Abe and Seb. They worked tirelessly till late into the evenings, with only Arby's chicken sandwiches, bought in exhausted late-night dinner desperation, as their meager compensation.

They aren't just cabinet frames, either, but shelves and rollers and drawers and hooks. And there was a wall shelf and a tall shoe rack too, which they built for the other side of the room.

I should mention, also, that while all this flurry of laundry-room activity was going on, I had a guy come and wash all the windows, and Seb also cleaned the garage and workbench area for me, since as some spaces got cleaner, others became intolerable by comparison.

But when it was done…after losing screws, and hunting everywhere for correctly-sized hex wrenches, and going back to the store for more shelves and drawers, and being repeatedly so-close-to-done and getting more and more annoyed when real life interfered…It was glorious! Glorious, I say! Look at those vast, calming, BLANK spaces of white along that wall! Spaces that contain large quantities of compartmentalized, sorted, organized material! It's a miracle.

It was the Friday before Labor Day when everything seemed complete, and that night I said to myself at last, "Now the baby can come!" (And cynically resigned myself to waiting three weeks with nothing to do but watch everything slide inexorably back toward dinginess and disorganization.)

The next few days were so calm.

We went to church.

My midwife Cathy came and visited and told me to eat lots of watermelon. (Happy to.) She took this picture of us all waving goodbye.

Junie held our friends' adorable kitten.

We went swimming one last time (with a friend). I love swimming SO MUCH when I'm pregnant in the summer!

Instead of our usual Labor Day Campfire, we took a picnic to the Hammock Park. We had hamburgers and watermelon lemonade and corn on the cob.

It was such a warm, peaceful, beautiful evening!

And the next morning…baby came! But I'm not ready to tell that story yet. :)