Week 29: Nesting

First, I have made it past week 28!

As the count down continues, the mix of feelings between excitement, anxiousness, plus a little bit of fear are all coming together.  I think my hormones have been rather kind to me (and to mic) so I haven't had many episodes of extreme mood swings, but as they say in all the books about "nesting instincts", the number one anxiety I have is the fact that I feel rather anxious to set up our home for little K's arrival.   I have already been converting all of our house cleaning methods away from chemical based stuff to natural solutions, and the next step is to set up the baby room.  The anxiety is compounded especially with the medical risks that I have adding more uncertainty to the timing, and I feel the energy drifting away every day as the third trimester comes and I am back to the half comatose state every day.

Thanks to the fact that I am having little K following so many of my friends' footsteps, I have been a great beneficiary of hand-me-downs.  Not only did I not have to buy any maternity clothing, little K will also be using cots, strollers, clothes, tubs from big brothers and sisters he will soon have a chance to meet.  They are now pretty much all collected and PILED in our living room extension area.  I had to draw the curtains constantly just so the sight of untidiness doesn't bother me.

The reason we haven't been able to set up the room yet is because my mother-in-law is back in HK again this year and spending an extended period with us -- the main reason mic has left work for two months this summer.  My father-in-law will be joining us in 2 weeks time for another week so it's a total period for about 6 weeks that we don't have our home to ourselves.  During this time we won't have the space to clear out and set up little K's room.  And if the past pattern indicates future performance, the consumption power of these two are quite unparalleled, so our place will also need to be a temporary storage for them until they pack all their goodies back home.  (MORE stuff PILED UP!)

I admire mic for having the heart and spending the time to do this for his parents, and I wanted to be the wife that's fully supportive, but at the same time the selfishness just creeps back into my heart constantly.   I am so wanting to have a bit of time for just the two of us before little K comes and before I get too big and tired, because the next time we will have that time for each other might be 20 years from now?  I am also so wanting to set up our home properly before I run out of energy (and that feels like an hourglass with the hole for the sand to go through suddenly widened while I watch it happen with zero control over my draining energy, kind of like superman meeting kryptonite).  And with all this going on in my mind and body I have to try to hide the impatience I am getting to be a proper host.

I started to think -- we all have multiple roles we are fulfilling in life.  We have had the luxury of our family being relatively healthy and independent the past decade, so we have pretty much concentrated on just being ourselves and playing the "husband" and "wife" role, but probably less so the "son" or "daughter" role.  In the future, in addition to taking on the new roles of being a "mother" and a "father", there will probably be more demands on our time as "sons and daughters" as our parents age as well.  Perhaps the "us" time era is long gone already, I just haven't had the courage to face it.  Also as new parents ourselves, we are inevitably shaping little K's surroundings and life by the roles that we choose to pay more attention to.  I, for one, had an amazingly close relationship with my grandmother, and if I don't provide little K with the environment with my in-laws, I am simply depriving him of that opportunity to even build that relationship.

All this reflection aside, I still really really want to have our flat back to set up the room!