2001-12-02
Sunday morning, 9 am. B just headed out to the old house to do more work. He's down to the last bathroom, replacing this nasty tileboard stuff that lines the tub and shower. Other than that, the major improvement that remains is refinishing the hardwood floors, but we think we'll go ahead and put the house on the market before doing those.
It's a lot of work to do the floors ourselves and a lot of money to pay someone to do them--money that would be better saved in order to pay two mortgages for as long as necessary. I think prospective buyers should be able to use their imaginations in that regard. We might end up offering an allowance of some kind toward the redoing of the floors, or agreeing to do them once we have a contract.
It will be so very nice to have this house off our hands.
So, here I am at the new house by myself--well, me and the dogs--and nothing urgently pressing to do. There's plenty I can and will do, tidying up the house and putting away all the non-perishable stuff I bought on yesterday's excursion, generally taking steps to get this place more ready for a baby to live in it.
People who don't know me very well have been asking me whether I've gotten the nursery ready; people who don't know me at all have asked me whether I've selected a theme for the nursery. Yeah, the theme is Babies don't need decorated rooms all to themselves. I mean, really, what does the kid know? I can not imagine spending the time or the money or the space many apparently do to create these little showcase nurseries.
We have two bedrooms upstairs (and one downstairs that B uses for an office). One is ours and the other is mine and the baby's. It contains a crib (full of junk at the moment), a treadmill, a small dresser with a TV on top (strategically placed in front of the treadmill), a large dresser the top of which will function as a changing table, a desk and an upholstered chair. There's also a large, walk-in closet I've filled with a shelving unit crammed with boxes of my stuff. It could stand better organizing but it will do.
Yesterday at the warehouse store I bought a box of disposable diapers. Huggies, if you must know. My intention--feel free to laugh at my naivete if you wish--is to use cloth diapers but I've heard that disposables make more sense for the first couple weeks. And I can imagine occasionally using them when venturing out of the house as well. It felt really weird to be buying diapers; I felt self-conscious, as though people would look into my cart and know I am a breeder. Which is a little ridiculous considering that I am very obviously pregnant. Don't mind my inconsistencies.
We'll see how the cloth diaper thing works out. Our new place gets water from a well and I'm a little concerned about doing lots of laundry, but no diaper service delivers way out here. Also, using a diaper service would negate much of the savings of using cloth and money is one piece of my motivation. Others are the putative fact that cloth-diapered children toilet train an average of six months earlier than disposable-diapered ones and the unproven safety of the chemical gels that make those Pampers and Huggies so astonishly absorbent. (Male fertility--sperm production, specifically--has been declining for the past 25 years, I've read, and the fact that disposables raise scrotal temperature roughly one degree is thought by some to be a culprit.) To be honest, the environmental argument doesn't factor in much--that's more like icing on the cake. So, that's the intention but sure, talk to me in a few months and see if I'm singing the same tune.
It's funny, all these intentions. Or call them hopes or plans, whatever. Experienced parents often laugh and say, "Yeah, we thought we'd do that, too. It worked out a little different."
There's the desire to avoid medication during labor, the intention to breastfeed. I guess these are the big ones. Then there's stuff like TV-watching and junkfood eating, which I'd like to keep to a minimum without being so severe as to turn them into forbidden fruits; I'd hate for the kid to be compelled to spend his early adulthood on the couch watching cartoons, eating sugary cereal and poptarts. I figure it'll work itself out pretty well. After all, we watch some, but not gobs, of TV (far less since moving beyond the range of cable availability and declining to pay for satellite access) and eat some, but not gobs, of less-than-nutritious food. Yeah, I'm sure it'll work out fine.
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