Countdown to the Babe: 7 Days

Oh yes, that's right - our little sweet-face is due in one week! Next Monday, May 14th. Not that he's likely to be on time (his parents rarely are . . . ), but the countdown is on. Well, it's been on for a while, but now it's really on :). 

I'm alternately insanely antsy ("get this baby out of me!") and insanely stressed ("oh my gosh we have so much to do before he gets here!"). Sometimes I'm even like, "Well, when it happens, it'll happen." But that sort of calm reasonableness is pretty rare. Brad's feeling the same way - except for the whole "get this baby out of me" thing. Which would be weird. On a bunch of levels. And would almost definitely motivate a story from The Enquirer.

But anyway. 

First babies are notoriously late arrivers (and, boy, do people love to remind you of that), but one happy fact is that my OB's office only lets mamas-to-be go till they're 41 weeks along. At lots of doctors' offices, that wait is stretched out by a looooooong 7 days - 42 weeks is pretty much the longest anyone (at least in the U.S.) is allowed to go before being induced.

At any rate, we'll see if this little dude makes his grand debut sooner rather than later. Brad's last day of work for the summer is, as usual, May 15, meaning we had rather impeccable timing though we certainly weren't planning it that way. He's got the next two days off so we can continue to bust our humps on the (still-not-done) nursery; clean and organize the house (which, as usual, went to heck during the last month of the semester); buy some last-minute nursery and baby stuff; and get some food cooked and frozen for those first few chaotic weeks. (Let's be honest though: he's doing all the cooking. And he'll be tagging along to my hopefully last-of-this-pregnancy OB appt. Tuesday a.m. 

We're nervous. We're excited. We're exhausted. We're about to be . . . parents?!?! Eeks, that's big!

An Organizational Disaster

If my house suffers from one illness, it's Atrocious Unmatched Flooring Disease, which can be cured only with time, effort, and money. But if my house suffers from two illnesses (and believe me, there are more than 2), the second is Clutter-itis. 

Not my kitchen, but some days, it might 
as well be . . . . 

Clutter-itis, as you may well know, is a result of Too-Much-Stuff-itis and the People-Who-Don't-Pick-Up-After-Themselves bug, an unfortunate combination that leads to messy spaces crowded with paper, clothing, boxes, and a host of other random items that lead me to say things like, "Why do we even own this?" and "I don't understand how I cleaned this living room two days ago and it looks like a war zone already!" 

With the new addition on the way, Brad and I are in need of some serious O-R-G-A-N-I-Z-A-T-I-O-N. If the two of us have managed to fill up (make a mess of?) four bedrooms, a two-car garage, two sheds (gulp that we even own sheds), and quite a number of closets, imagine what the situation will look like in a few months when we're +1. And you know those babies bring tons of stuff along with them (like, where are we even gonna put the stroller, let alone all those toys?!). 

And so Brad and I have resolved to get organized, de-clutter, and stay on top of (or at least next to) the general mess that builds in the course of a day/week. 

Okay, it was bad, but not this bad 

For the past few weeks we've been working on this in our more or less haphazard way: over the course of several days, I shredded about 4 months-worth of paper; we cleaned out the sheds and garage some (only some, believe me) when it was 50+ degrees out a few Sundays ago; I transformed a wasted bedroom closet once filled with "crap" into a very useful abode for my out-of-season-clothes and about 35 pairs of shoes. 

Not bad, but we've got a long way to go before this house is anywhere near as together as it needs to be. There's still a frightening amount of junk lurking in those sheds, an absurd amount of stuff-that-needs-shredded in bags/boxes in the garage from years ago, and the kitchen cabinet situation is anything but user-friendly. And that's just for starters. Soon enough, though, I hope to have a nursery closet organization project to show . . . it's already underway as of yesterday. Then it's onto that dang kitchen!

Cleaning out the garage

I can't even muster the energy for a fancy, interesting, or otherwise worthy title after spending 2.5 hours tonight dealing with this: 

Yeah, that's our garage. AKA the place where cars are supposed to go. AKA the place to store all kinds of crap of various levels of usefulness/uselessness. 

We undertook this cleaning-out-the-garage task last summer and, well, you see how that went. I think we spent about three days, got things in reasonable shape, and lost interest. What you see here is the result of a year's worth of piling things on top of one another, shoving them in corners, and otherwise dropping them where we stand. And what we've started with this time is definitely worse than what we had going on last summer.

This is looking to be about a week-long project. I sigh just contemplating the necessary amount of work. 

First, we've got to clean it out. Which means throwing away, donating, and recycling everything we can possibly get rid of. That's where we started today (but I forgot to take a pic. of our progress and it's getting dark out). 

As with my wardrobe, I am in shock at the amount of "stuff" I (we) own. Stuff I've had since high school. Stuff I forgot about. Stuff I bought two months ago and misplaced under other stuff. I mean, it's like Stuff Central down there. 

After we've cleared it out, then begins the sorting. What should stay in the garage? Come inside? Go in the sheds? (If I haven't mentioned that we own sheds, let me say now that we do - 2 of them - but they came with the house and are a whole other story.) 

Finally, there's the organizing. I get a headache just thinking about this. Tools, picture frames, cleaning supplies, paint, random household goods (humidifier, board games) - the list goes on and on. And on. Not exactly the way I want to spend my afternoons for the next 5 or 6 days, but if it doesn't get done during the summer, when's it gonna get done?