The mother of all instincts

With five weeks and three days to go until D-Day (Jacob’s due date!), my nesting instinct has arrived.

Before I was expecting, I had heard tales about how in your last weeks of pregnancy a sudden, uncontrollable urge to scrub every inanimate object within a 20-miles radius would set in. I now know those stories are 100 percent true, but I have also discovered that the cleaning compulsion is even more extreme than that. At least in my case, the urge extends to animate objects, too—i.e. my husband.

While carpooling down to work with Tom yesterday, I began scrubbing behind his right ear. Weird? Absolutely. But the weirdest part was that it felt completely natural.

While mother-chimping (not an actual verb for you grammar Nazis out there) should have been a clue that my nesting instinct was alive and kicking, I didn’t think twice about it.

Then, while carefully dusting off the tops of our candles last night, it dawned on me that candle dusting wasn’t a usual part of my normal cleaning routine. Then, I had another revelation: dusting anything at 12:30 at night wasn’t normal. Period. Then again, neither was reorganizing my lingerie and jewelry chests or scrubbing out the plastic doors seals on the refrigerator, all of which I had done hours earlier.

Yes, my nesting instinct had officially set in. (And, still being in our apartment at the moment, I feel much like a mother eagle trying to fit into a sparrow’s nest.)

It’s a cruel joke of Mother Nature, really. Just when your body has ballooned to epic proportions that make every movement awkward, you can’t make yourself sit still. That cup on the coffee table that your husband JUST finished drinking out of, that pair of errant shoes by the door—They. Must. Be. Picked. Up. NOW.

Despite it impacting my sleep schedule last night, the nesting instinct is already a clear winner in the “Best Of” Pregnancy Symptoms Contest. What’s not to love about having sudden bursts of energy that make you feel as though you can conquer the world—or at least that pile of dirty laundry? In my mind, not a thing.

So, thank you, Nesting Instinct. Feel free to stay as long as you’d like. Since I have to clean the baseboards anyway, I might as well enjoy it.

Now, if only You could make getting up more enjoyable…