Sweet (and urgent) Nesting Moments

For thirty-six weeks, this baby has been growing within me. I find pregnancy to be the wildest journey, albeit paling in comparison to its next stage of full-blown parenting. The midwife I saw recently seemed slightly concerned that I might go into labor early given the amount of contractions I’ve been having, and I would guess the same. Beau was born at exactly 37 weeks after much of the same buildup, although I was walking around Manhattan most days right up until then. My lifestyle is a little less active than that here in Santa Cruz unfortunately. Truth be told, I’m pretty thrilled to have my own car to get me to the hospital in rather than nearly delivering in a dirty taxi a la Beau Shyba.

Maybe it’s because this is my fourth long term pregnancy, or the fact that I have three other children, a puppy and a career to manage now, but I haven’t been keeping track of the weeks very diligently. So when I heard the words “thirty-six” I sort of panicked. Not a few days later I found myself in the Labor & Delivery ward with back-to-back contractions (turns out I was dehydrated from being sick over the weekend). Needless to say, I came right home and started washing everything: The Moses basket bedding, the blankets, the itty bitty baby onesies and other sweet pieces. It’s my most favorite part of nesting, actually; The moment I get to wash, dry, fold and pack these little baby clothes in preparation for our intended, newest love. I have a ton of these from our previous three babies, but I also made sure to have some new ones on hand too. The new mBaby collection from Munchkin® has some truly special, soft and even some organic pieces that I really love and can’t wait to see put to use.

The one real difference between welcoming this baby and the other three is we haven’t shared the gender. We wanted it to be a surprise for the kids mostly, but I couldn’t not find out myself. In fact, Justin really didn’t want to know the gender either, and I made it a solid 3 and a half hours before accidentally spilling the beans and ruining the surprise for him. I’m doing my very best to hide all of the more gender decisive clothing away so that they don’t see it-I really just like my babies wearing white or off-white anyway, so there’s a lot of that. I’m very particular about what I buy to clothe my children in, especially when they’re brand new, and I’ve found the new mBaby line to be not only soft, just thick enough and sturdy through washes, but they’re really cute too-not overly sweet and lots of different options.

It’s really, really sweet to see Zoe so excited about feeding and rocking the baby, as well as even helping me fold baby clothes. “I wish the baby was going to be all mine”, she says. Sigh.

We’re still putting together a makeshift nursery of sorts in our master bedroom, as Zoe’s room isn’t quite big enough for a crib and Jack and Beau are already teamed up in our other room. Our babies tend to stay with us for the first year anyway, and hopefully we’ll be able to move into a slightly larger home with a little more room by the time this baby is ready for an actual crib. Until then, we have a little dresser that is filling with diapers, clothes and blankets to be at-the-ready when we bring our fourth bundle home. This preparation and anticipation doesn’t get any less fun, I don’t think… Perhaps that’s one reason we keep having babies!

Thank you to Munchkin®mBaby for sponsoring this post, and thank you for reading!