36 Weeks and Nesting...

First, thank you to everyone who gave an opinion on our baby names. Now we'll wait to see who Hermie is before making any final decisions.

I hit 36 weeks on Friday, and I'm getting a little panicky. We had our hospital tour this morning, and I felt vaguely nauseous as I thought of impending labor - at least it only lasts a few hours (hopefully) and then we'll finally get to meet Hermie. My nesting urges have been coming on strong. A week ago, I cleaned my house from top to bottom, thinking that if the baby came early, it might just break me to come home to unmopped floors. :) Then I realized that if the baby goes to term, I'll have to mop the floor a few times more to have a clean floor to come home to. Anyway, here's the belly at 36 weeks:


Some of my nesting instincts have been stranger than others. On Monday, I just had to find Halloween costumes for the kids. We headed out to a couple of consignment stores and found the perfect costumes. Asher will be a "Sharptooth" and Kaia is Pocahontas. She's been on a big Native American kick ever since seeing Disney's Pocahontas in August. I'd say the money I paid for her costume has already been worth it since Kaia has been Pocahontas every day this week. In fact, as we've headed out to the grocery store and on other errands, she tells me, "Mom, don't tell anyone I'm pretend. I'm really Pocahontas." She literally beams when people say, "Look, there's Pocahontas!"



This picture illustrates another one of my stranger nesting instincts - buying 22 boxes of cereal at Wegman's, one of our favorite grocery stores. The sell their own version of some of our favorite cereals like Wheat Chex (theirs is Wheat Squares) for half the price of the brand name cereal. Cereal is a real staple around here and I was getting very worried about the imminent arrival of the baby when we were down to only a few boxes in the house.


I've been making good headway on some of my other projects. This week I finished up Hermie's blanket:


And I'm almost done with Christmas stockings. I need to finish the last of the stitching on the boy stocking and then add embellishments to both of them. I had made the girl stocking a few years ago but then couldn't find it when I was pregnant with Kaia, so I made her a different one. I figured I would make the boy one so I would be covered either way. It will be easy to sew the needed stocking up once the baby is here, but there's no way I would have time for all that cross stitching after baby's arrival.


I definitely have the tendency to get obsessive about my projects sometimes, so I've been grateful to come across a couple of quotes that have really meant a lot to me in the last couple of weeks. First, in the recent General RS Broadcast, Sister Julie Beck quoted Elder Uchtdorf:

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf taught: “A wise man once distinguished between ‘the noble art of getting things done’ and ‘a nobler art of leaving things undone.’ True ‘wisdom in life,’ he taught, consists of ‘the elimination of non-essentials.’ ” President Uchtdorf then asked: “What are the nonessential things that clutter your days and steal your time? What are the habits you may have developed that do not serve a useful purpose? What are the unfinished or unstarted things that could add vigor, meaning, and joy to your life?”

Then this quote from Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin from his address in the April 2002 General Conference:

Sometimes we feel that the busier we are, the more important we are—as though our busyness defines our worth. Brothers and sisters, we can spend a lifetime whirling about at a feverish pace, checking off list after list of things that in the end really don't matter.

That we do a lot may not be so important. That we focus the energy of our minds, our hearts, and our souls on those things of eternal significance—that is essential.

So I've been trying to eliminate the non-essentials from my life, which mostly means that I'm spending far less time on the computer. And I'm trying to spend my days enjoying Kaia and Asher before the dynamics of our family change and my evenings pursuing or finishing things that "add vigor, meaning, and joy" to my life.