Nesting

When B started getting a cold in the middle of the week, I was a bit surprised because K and I came down with our cold a week before and I had thought that since B had gone so long without getting it that he safe.

As it turns out, B was getting an entirely different cold, which he has now passed on to K and me before we could completely get over the last one. Sigh. Thankfully, I didn't have to work yesterday or today, so I was able to get a couple good naps. Better yet, I don't have to work next weekend at all, so hopefully I can rest up a bit and help out my depressed immune system. Hopefully we can all get better - I'm a little tired of our house sounding like a tb sanatorium.

On the positive side, I'm incredibly excited that a friend from the Netherlands is coming to visit this week! We met in England during foreign study my junior year, and I haven't seen her in ten years.

Besides getting to see an old friend I haven't seen in forever, her visit also has the positive effect of making us finish the major rearranging of our house that we started last weekend. Our house has an L-shaped living room and dining room, and a large finished room downstairs. We decided to put the bulk of our books in the living room/dining room area and put the couches and tv downstairs along with all of K's toys. It worked perfectly well until we decided to have another baby who is going to need the third bedroom which is currently the guest room, leaving us with the question of what to do with guests. As much as I'm sure guests would love to sleep in the same room as the baby and take over nighttime baby duty for me, we decided the only real option was to move the futon downstairs. But that left us with the question of what to do when there's a guest downstairs asleep and we're still awake and would like to watch tv. There's also the fact that in the increasingly likely event of my having a c-section, I'll need to avoid the stairs as much as possible for a while.

So last weekend we moved half of the books downstairs, the couch and tv upstairs and turned our living room into an actual living room. So far the new arrangement is very pleasant. Even though I'm fine climbing stairs right now, I'm tired and sore enough these days that it's awfully nice not to have to climb stairs every time I want something to eat or need to get K something.

The second major change was figuring out how to handle the very likely possibility of two children in our bed on a regular basis. We're planning on having Wulfrith in our room at first, and if he's anything like his sister, he'll probably wind up staying in our bed after feedings because it's much easier just to go back to sleep with the baby in bed than trying to gingerly transfer a sleeping baby back to the bassinet and hope against hope that they will stay asleep. But K also comes into bed with us on a regular basis, and B and I usually wind up hugging the edges of the bed as a result. There just isn't room for another child.

So I measured and discovered that K's toddler bed is exactly the same height as our bed, making it ideal to attach to our bed as a co-sleeper. We scored an Ikea Kura bed at nicely lowered price for K from Craigslist this week, so her old bed can go into our room when the baby comes and eventually be Wulfrith's first Big Boy bed.

However, in the way of these things, as of yesterday the state of our house was as follows: living room mostly set up except for several piles of books waiting to go downstairs; new bed for K residing on the futon in the guest room; basement an unspeakable mess. If nothing else, I assume Judith hasn't taken of any forms of asceticism and would like to be able to sleep on the futon itself without piles of wooden slats in the way, so we at least had to get the new bed set up. As of this evening, the bed is set up and K is thrilled*, most of the books are cleared out of the living room and we've managed to move most of our dvds upstairs onto shelves and we've made progress on the basement. It's still unspeakable, but at least all of the furniture is where we want it to be so all it will take is someone taking the time to go downstairs and shelve books. As long as keep her from looking at the basement, our house is mostly ready for a guest and part of the way ready for a baby. Not a bad weekend's work.


*Can I take a moment to say how much I love that K has reached the age of semi-reason? I mean, she's still three, so she certainly has her moments. But for the most part these days, she can be told "We can't do x because of y" and will mostly accept that. Because of that, we can also make bargains. While B put the bed together this afternoon, I took K to get some new bedding for it. I had scoped out a very cute generic fairy princess bed-in-a-bag set on sale that I probably should have just bought without bringing K into it. Because she took one look and rejected it in favor of a much more expensive Disney princess comforter. The princess didn't bother me, but I try to avoid giving to much money to The Mouse, and I wasn't too happy at the amount I was going to have to spend. But luckily, we found a Disney Princess lamp on clearance that K wanted as well. So I told her that we could only afford to get the lamp if we got the fairy bedding and she actually went for it. A year ago, that would never have flown.