Nesting

Last night just as Stephanie and I were starting to fall asleep, she nudged me to say that the baby had woken up,“How do you know?” I asked. She then began to tell me about the strange feelings and sensations that she was currently experiencing in the darkness of our bedroom. These internal nudges and movements, constant reminders of the miracle growing inside, the beginning of the maternal bond between mother and child.

You can see that Stephanie is pregnant at the moment, in fact, it surprised me just how much when she informed me last week that we’d reached the half way stage! Whilst she is having that physical bond with her child, I won’t be able to feel any movement for a few more weeks, until the bump has filled out and physically witness the baby starting to kick.

I am however, not entirely useless at this stage. For the past few weeks we have been getting some of the house in order, particularly the nursery where the baby will sleep when he or she is a little older.

When we moved into our house, the room had just been vacated by Craig, my Mum and Dad’s foster child, who had inherited it off my sister. Having brought the house off my parents I had wanted Oliver to have my old room, but knowing that we would one day (hopefully) have another child, we cleared the smallest room out first, created a nursery whilst my old room laid untouched. Once Oliver was old enough and we had fulfilled my own fantasy, a football themed bedroom Oliver finally moved out, leaving the nursery empty.

In the subsequent three years the nursery has become home to old toys, old clothes, bits and pieces that we haven’t managed to bring ourselves to throw away. Sentiment gets in the way of practicality “but this toy was the one Oliver was playing with when he smiled for the first time”. It’s only when you go back to it years later and it’s covered in dust and you realise, it’s only an old toy, the memory lives on in your mind, you don’t need the physical reminder.

When Stephanie was pregnant with Oliver we had a blank canvas to start with. The excitement of our first child was heightened by creating a living, breathing environment for our new born baby. Our spare room in the flat that we lived in at the time was used as a home office. Well it, was a room with a computer inside! But once everything had been removed, the walls were white and we had a space to begin from nothing.

This time around, it is a matter of taking what we have already got, neutralising everything, moving the keepsakes we were given, the ornaments that spell out Oliver’s name and the teddy bears he was given as a baby and creating a warm and inviting place for the new baby.

Really, the tasks that we are doing now could be used as an analogy for the whole second baby experience. Rather than something new, exciting, unknown and mysterious, building a new world from the reality we’ve always known, we are perfecting, compromising, rounding off the sharp edges of the lives we are now living. The new baby will hopefully be the final piece of our puzzle and it’s just a matter of rearranging the pieces that are already there.