I am on maternity leave and alternating my time between sleeping, appointments, nesting, eating, and sleeping. I have energy but almost no mobility, which is an oddly frustrating place to be in and puts me at great risk of turning into a Sargent major type who barks orders at the rest of my household because I want ALL THE THINGS DONE NOW. 🙂 Plus I’m hungry for the first time this pregnancy. Always. Even if I’ve just eaten. Even if I’m too full to eat anything else. I have conversations in my head that go like this:

Wow, I feel sick.
Yes, that’s because you ate a huge bowl of dinner!
Ugh I feel really awful. I hope I don’t throw up.
Don’t you dare throw up!
Hmm. I’m hungry. I wonder if we have any dried apricots left?
What? We are not having anything else to eat! We feel sick, remember?
Oh, apricots are only little though.
That doesn’t matter! How can you still be hungry?? Maybe you’re dehydrated. Go and have a big glass of water.
Okay then. Ugh, now I really feel sick. I’m so distended it’s like I can feel my skin stretching. I really feel like a donut though.
You are nuts! We are not having a donut. We don’t have any donuts.
I think I need to lie down. I feel awful. Oh, look, there’s one banana left!
Argh!!

Pregnancy hormones are also fun. Everything is personal, and everything makes me cry. All the damn time. And the nesting thing! Yikes. I waddle around like an oversized duck and no one else can keep up with me. I have decimated the front garden with the pruning of its life. Things that have not been cleaned in years are being cleaned. I am increasingly ruthless with space making and have got to the point where the things I’m boxing up and giving away to the local op shop are clothes and shoes and craft supplies and books I like, because we will have 4 people here and I simply need more damn space! RAWR.

I have also bought an art desk, one that tilts so the cats don’t get onto it. It is gorgeous. It is glass, which means installing a bright light beneath it will turn it into a cheap light box, and I got it on a very good special for the end of the financial year. When we moved Star in, I lost my studio room and everything was downsized to a table and desk in the lounge room. Now that four of us need to share this living space, and it needs to be baby proofed, that is not going to work at all. It’s the only space that’s got heating and cooling so it’s essential we can all share it. So I’m overhauling it. I’ve got rid of the table, the desk will be cleared off to become a permanent study space for Star, Rose, and whoever has study to do, and I’m installing my new art desk into the dining room. Which kind of means I have a room I can call a ‘studio’ again! I’ve tested leaving a wet oil painting on it for a few days, and so far no painted cats or footprints all over the house. Excellent! It’s all a lot of work though.

The glorious desk! I only plunged into extreme self hate for about 4 days after buying it. That’s not bad for me.

As my kitchen is so small, the dining room is where all the kitchen supplies are stored, so it will be a shared space between art things and cooking things. Some items like cake tins have been moved to the shed. Mostly I’m keeping the admin/household stationary in the lounge room with the computer and filing cabinet.

The cot is half assembled in the bedroom and the furniture (like side tables) we can no longer fit in the room (it’s completely taken up by bed, cot, change table, and tallboy for baby clothes) are out in the shed. Baby clothes that are size 1 and up have been soaked, washed, dried, and boxed up in plastic waterproof boxes in the shed. The lounge room is starting to look a lot better with a lot more space, I still have to clear the desk to turn it into a study station, but progress is being made!

I fill all the household bins and wait impatiently until they’re collected before I can do more pruning/sorting/cleaning. I am very determined! I have to do lists of things I want done before baby arrives which we are ploughing through at high speed, I am working on sorting out the sheds so we can find what’s in there and store new things, and I am setting up better cleaning systems and making sure we have the right tools and can keep things ticking over. I am also determined that as I’ll be doing half my labouring at home, it is not going to be a horrible messy pet fur encrusted experience. I want a clean bathtub, and glasses to drink out of and a floor that doesn’t stick to my feet. Chaos will descend on us soon enough, we are not starting out with it!

This is the desk I need to clear of art supplies so it can be used for study:

That leaves us with more room in the lounge for baby play things, for guests, to put up a temporary table for dining or big projects or tax sorting out which can be taken down again and give us the room back. Some space for hanging wet clothes in winter too. Life size tetris, it really is. 🙂