Need to Nest?
Prepping Your Home for Baby’s Arrival
During your pregnancy if you find yourself with an uncontrollable urge to rearrange your spice cabinet or color coordinate your button collection, you are probably in nesting mode. Often hitting around the fifth month of pregnancy, nesting is a primal instinct that, although might look crazy to outsiders, is a way for an expectant mother to feel in control.
Nesting hits everyone in different ways but it often centers on cleaning and organizing. Go ahead and feed your need to scrub the bottom of everyone’s shoes with a toothbrush, but don’t give in to every urge, as you should take some precautions to keep you and your baby safe.
Chemicals and Fumes
If you really must change the nursery walls from Spring Lawn green to Lush Meadow green, leave the painting to someone else. Many paint pigments are filled with lead, zinc and aluminum and the fumes are best avoided by a pregnant woman. Zeke’s Paint & Design Center in Kansas City carries Natura paint, which has zero volatile organic compounds (VOCs), a much healthier option. However, because of any high spots you need to reach, the mom-to-be might best leave painting to somebody else.
Urges like scouring your house from top to bottom are completely normal--just utilize safe cleaners. If you haven’t already, this is the ideal time to choose natural cleaning products. If someone else cleans your house, make sure to ask what products they use. Even if you aren’t in your home while it’s being cleaned, the fumes can linger for hours.
Hard to Reach Spots
As your belly grows during pregnancy your center of gravity shifts and that can test your balance. If you stretch too far up for that elusive cobweb or try to climb a ladder you could become unstable and fall. During organizing frenzies, focus your attention on the easier-to-reach areas like lower cabinets.
Animals
If you have a cat, you are probably aware that cat feces can contain a parasite that causes toxoplasmosis, a serious blood infection that can cause birth defects. You definitely want to avoid changing the kitty litter until after your baby arrives.
Even if you don’t have a feline friend, take notice if there are neighborhood cats that pass through your yard. They might use your garden as a litter box, possibly putting you into contact with their feces.
Sort Baby Items
Go through old baby clothes you already own or items that have been passed along to you. Look beyond just 0-3 months size clothing. Once the baby arrives, you will be pleased to have already sorted and weeded out items that didn’t survive well in storage. Some stains have a tendency to darken over time.
Cook and freeze meals
Cooking a well-balanced meal for your family might seem unbearable to your sleep deprived, non-showered self in the first several weeks. Take time now to plan a few weeks of dinners and you will thank yourself later.
Buy the essentials
When a baby first comes home from the hospital it can get by on surprisingly little. However, there are a few essentials you must have on hand. A car seat, diapers, wipes and onesies are on that list.
“I was so busy prepping the fun things for my son’s nursery, that I forgot the essentials. He came three weeks early and we didn’t have a car seat yet!” shares mom Amy Stiles of Gladstone.
Casey Irwin, an expectant KCMO mom, has shared her nesting to-do list responsibilities with her husband. She wants everything perfect and reminds him whenever he sits down to relax that there are more productive ways he could be using his free time.
Like Casey, for my first pregnancy I had a million projects that I wanted completed. However, for my second pregnancy I realized that although I might have the urge to scrub my garage floor, there were much more practical baby-related ways to focus my energy.
No matter what your nesting instincts drive you to do, as long as they are safe for you and the baby, go ahead and pay attention to them. Once that little bundle of joy has arrived, you may wonder if you will ever have time to clean the house again.
Robin Gedman lives in Prairie Village and wishes her nesting instincts would kick in now, after her children have been born, as she has lots of closets that need organizing.