I remember when it hit me with my first pregnancy - I wasn’t a naturally tidy person back then (since then I’ve changed) but suddenly I was told by my male co-workers, “You’re too pregnant and we don’t want you going into labor in the office - go home and don’t come back till you’ve had the baby.” Fine. Just because it was a week after my due date… jerks. So home I went. I started cleaning, a little here, a little there. I would be standing at the kitchen counter so groggy when suddenly I would remember something, the junk drawer, oh my god, the junk drawer is just a pile of mess waiting to be cleaned. Who needs a junk drawer anyway? A place for everything and everything in it’s place.

My husband was thrilled, suddenly our house was… was… was as clean as a very funky apartment can be! Then everyone around me started chuckling, “Yep, you’re nesting.” they said as they watched me scrub the baseboards, after vacuuming them. Ha! I’m not… ok I admitted it when I caught myself removing all the curtains from their rods and… ironing them… I never iron! That was huge. That was when I laughed at myself.

Since becoming a stay at home mom I take this new job very seriously and in my humble opinion it’s fair to say that part of that job is keeping the house clean. I’ve become a much better cleaner and I wont say I enjoy cleaning my house but I enjoy living in a clean house. I get aggravated by that spot on the pergo floor that I keep walking by and can’t just let it go the way I might have way back when. We’ve got Monday as a cleaning day and we do our best to recover from the weekend without losing a whole day to chores, after all the most important part of being a stay at home mom is the mom part. So my daughter has to be alotted some fun time too. Tho I have to admit, she thinks cleaning the house is fun. Well, she thinks playing in the kitchen sink with bubbly water and tupperware is fun (We’ve termed this ‘washing the dishes’ and it’s what she does while I vacuum).

Because of my sleep, the intense heartburn any time I bend down, or the fact that bending now equals me having to rush to the bathroom and pee it’s fair to say that my cleaning capabilities have slipped. I’m quite busy with this little girl, her dance & gymnastics classes and all the other things that get in the way of me and my favorite cleaning supplies. But… I suspect recently nesting kicked in. Suddenly I’m bright eyed and bushy tailed to scrub corners with a toothbrush and refold the towels that my mother folded the wrong way (who folds a towel like that anyway?).

Yes nesting does come back a second time around. I wasn’t certain but I felt it so intensely the other night as I finished cleaning the kitchen and attempted to sit my exhausted ass down on the couch. I couldn’t stop thinking about that pile of miscellaneous crap that sat on the end of my kitchen counter. What was that crap anyway? A few crayons, my daughter’s barrette, some old greeting cards from my birthday back in June, receipts of things we’ve already eaten, worn or otherwise used up? There’s a place for all those things and why should I sit on the couch when it would only take a second to put them all away - then I can sit. So I jumped back up with all the spring in my step of a woman half as pregnant, and put every last thing away. Ahhh… now don’t think about the junk drawer… don’t think about it I said!