Verbal nesting

Andrew has pointed out that whenever I open my mouth lately, 99% of the time it's to announce something that I need to do. Or that we need to do. Both of which roughly translate into things I often wish he would do (but I say "we" or "I" out of politeness).

I need to organize these baby clothes.

We need to get the front yard landscaped.

We need to plan Christmas presents.

I need to return books to the library.

I need to go through those boxes.

We need to finish painting the back deck.

We need to trim the ivy off the trees.

I need to... We need to... I need to... We need to...

This list of mine is especially active in the evenings when I'm too tired to actually do anything.

"Calm down," he tells me. "You need to calm down. None of that stuff needs to happen immediately."

"I can't help it!" I told him. "I'm verbally nesting! I don't have the time or the energy to actually nest so I'm just expressing my desire to nest in words."

So that's what we've taken to calling my ever-growing list of need-tos, which I'm sure will disappear after the baby is born and I realize that the world really isn't going to end if we don't have our front yard landscaped or have all the baby clothes from newborn to 12 months washed and sorted. It will just keep spinning and we'll just make do.

That's not to say that I haven't knocked anything off the list. I have preregistered at the hospital. I have begun making payments on our future hospital bills. I have put, like, three things into my hospital bag that I really need to finish packing. 

There's just so much other stuff that we "need" to do. And since I can't do it all...I just talk about it.

*****

The other day a friend of mine asked me for a link to my baby registry—haha! Like I had a registry ready!

She told me to just take the day and make a registry for myself, but, see, we were also working on a midterm project together so I couldn't just take the day to make a registry! 

So I took some of the day and tried to make a registry but, like, making registries is really hard for me. Like, telling people "this is what I want"?! That seems like an impossible task when (a) I don't even really know what I want (or need), and (b) it seems way too forward to me and wounds my sense of...introversion? Passivism? Decorum? 

Anyway, I didn't ever finish the registry so this sweet friend, impatient at my slothful registration—eventually just sent me a gift card, which was so sweet of her.

Point is: creating a registry, going through baby things and deciding what I need, etc. All of that is part of my verbal nesting because I can't seem to wrap my brain around the idea of actually sitting down and doing it.

But I really do need to order a breast pump. Like, for real...