I'm a "brooding hen"

I'm feeling justified about my insane behavior.... I googled "nesting" and this is what I found:

Around the fifth month of pregnancy, the "nesting" instinct can set in. This is an uncontrollable urge to clean one's house brought on by a desire to prepare a nest for the new baby, to tie up loose ends of old projects and to organize your world.

Females of the animal kingdom are all equipped with this same need. It is a primal instinct. Just as you see birds making their nests, mothers-to-be do exactly the same thing. The act of nesting puts you in control and gives a sense of accomplishment toward birth. You may become a homebody and want to retreat into the comfort of home and familiar company, like a brooding hen. The nesting urge can also be seen as a sign of the onset of labor when it occurs close to 40 weeks of pregnancy.

Nesting brings about some unique and seemingly irrational behaviors in pregnant women and all of them experience it differently. Women have reported throwing away perfectly good sheets and towels because they felt the strong need to have "brand new, clean" sheets and towels in their home. They have also reported doing things like taking apart the knobs on kitchen cupboards, just so they could disinfect the screws attached to the knobs. Women have discussed taking on cleaning their entire house, armed with a toothbrush. There seems to be no end to the lengths a nesting mother will go to prepare for her upcoming arrival.

This unusual burst of energy is responsible for women ironing anything in the house that couldn't out run them. Being preoccupied with ant killing, squishing them one at a time for weeks on end. Packing and unpacking the labor bag 50 times. Cleaning the kitchen cupboards and organizing everything by size to the point that you make sure the silverware patterns match when it's stacked in the cutlery drawer. Sorting the baby's clothes over and over again is a favorite theme. Taking them out of the drawers and re-folding them, putting them away and doing it over and over again. Nesting will provide interesting stories for years to come.


I don't know if it's PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) surfacing from my last baby when the movers came 2 days after we brought Aspen home to move us to our new home and disrupt my little nest, or if it's severe anxiety about having a baby the same week as Christmas which gives me anxiety all by itself, or if it's plain and simple nesting... but i've been acting like a crazy brooding hen. And for quite a while now. This srticle makes me feel a little better about my behavior. I haven't unscrewed any door knobs, but I have cleaned about every inch of my home, and gotten everything squared away so there will be space for this new baby. For the past 2 1/2 years, our extra bedroom has been our office/scrapbooking room. But now we'll need to put a little person there. However in order for us to make space, some major re-vamping had to occur. So a BIG thanks to my sweet hubby who helped me even though he's thinking we still have quite a while before this baby comes. And on top of his crazy school, work schedule he built a shed to re-organize the garage to make space to clean out the basement in order to re-locate all my scrapbooking stuff to downstairs in order to make space upstairs for the baby. It was no small feat that has involved multiple trips to the DI and the dump (lucky for us we live nearly around the corner from the dump). So I'm happy to say that I feel like my nest is coming along. My home is clean (not that it will stay that way for 3 more months) and we have a space for this little man. I'm one happy crazy mamma in waiting! or brooding hen, however you look at it!

sigh. Now for packing and unpacking that hospital bag, and storing up some meals in the freezer, and getting all my Christmas shopping done by Thanksgiving... I don't think my nesting is done quite yet, wink wink!