Mission Baby Room Prep: Take One

I understand nesting, and I'm familiar with that sense of urgency. I'm a terrible procrastinator (proposed and defended my thesis in the same semester while taking 12 hrs of graduate classes and planning my wedding!) because I work well under pressure (I graduated and I'm still married!). The baby situation is no different. The 'what if's' keep you from working too far ahead, and just when you feel assured that you will, in fact, be having a baby, you have less than 15 weeks to prepare your home for another human, for whom you have NOTHING. Pressure's on. I'm 27 weeks prego, so I figure I've got 9 weeks or so of productivity until I'm too huge (um, great with child) to be any help at all. Five of those weekends are booked, so unless the kiddo is going to sleep in a dog crate, Jesse and I have a lot of work to do. That work began this weekend when we cleaned out the closet in what will be the baby's room... well, that's not exactly how it went.

Every household has that closet which is the black hole for those all-important I-might-need-this-again-someday items. That closet is in Tyson's future nursery and it became the genesis of Mission Baby Room Prep last weekend. I do not have any issues throwing things away when the time comes. I already had a full trash bag awaiting Jesse when he appeared upstairs to 'help'. I had this day pictured as a streamlined attack on clutter. Find junk, put it in a bag, eliminate junk - BAM! Clean room. Jesse, on the other hand, preferred to sift through the bags and ask me why I was throwing _________ in the trash. Can't we donate/sell/use/save/re-gift this? So much for streamlined - and that was just my stuff.

WAY TOO MANY MINUTES LATER, we reached 'his' section of the closet. I took a couple of his boxes out for him to sift through as I continued to bag up my items to be thrown away. I like to go item by item, creating 'keep', 'toss', and 'donate' piles (yes, just like Clean Sweep. It works. Jesse should watch more HGTV). Jesse prefers to sit in a pile of trash reminiscing about where each piece came from. Honey! It's my ticket stub from when I got kicked out of a Bills game for throwing snowballs at the ref! BABE! It's my number from a track meet in high school! LOOK! It's an ornament from 1987! WOW! My running tights (from when he weighed 150lbs). If he lived alone, he would build a shrine to his childhood.

After three hours or so, I had to take a break so I left Jesse (and his pile of 'memories') and went downstairs, hoping he was making some progress. Instead, he was engaging in a ritualistic farewell to some of his favorite 'finds' from the black hole closet. I may never get the image out of my head.