"I don't know much about babies, but I know they cry and they eat and they poop"

So reads dw's comment to Monday's post. Since this is pretty much the extent of baby knowledge that my man and I have acquired over the past months, I am beginning to wonder why we spent a small fortune on childbirth and parenting classes. Let me recount last Saturday's mini-scare: Here I was, lifting stuff, not heavy stuff, just some stuff, up onto a shelf. And suddenly I felt this really intense pain all over my midsection, and it lasted something like thirty seconds. So I went to my betrothed and said, "Love, I don't want to freak you out, but I think I just had a contraction." He's cool as a cucumber in any and all life situations, but what did he do on Saturday? Freak out. He went pale and started talking fast, and then he pushed me into a chair, gave me a glass of water, and told me to stop having contractions because he wasn't ready yet for this. So nevermind the party we had been invited to go to; we hung out at home all evening waiting for whatever else there was to come. Which was nothing. False alarm. Probably just a friendly reminder that my torso muscles were working hard as it were. (Giant belly=really heavy.)

Point of the story: we're ten days away from doom day my due date, but we don't feel ready and keep telling the Bean to stay put. Since there's no way the baby will stay where he is till April, which is, by Hubs' estimate, the time we're ready to have a child, I guess it's good that at least materially we're ready. I'm not interior-designy inclined, so don't judge what you're about to see too harshly, namely the results of December's apartment-mega-rearrangement efforts (it wasn't enough to move every piece of furniture in our apartment, I also moved every single of our 3,000 books, somehow thinking that I'd bring zen into my life by putting them in alphabetical order.) Thanks to our über-generous families, we have really cool baby gear that is now spread out evenly over the apartment.

Let's start in the office, the focal point of which this has become:

There's more baby "entertainment furniture" on the other side... a baby bouncer and an activity gym, and we're thinking of giving the baby a whip so he can properly motivate us to work while himself bouncing his days away.

We moved everything around in the living room to make room for Bean Cage #1:

Bean Cage #2 shares the bedroom with us:

And then there's what was formerly known as the "storage room." In lieu of proper closets we used the spare room, tucked underneath the roof and up some scary stairs, to store junk college papers, a collection of non-functioning vacuum parts, boxes containing God-knows-what, and whatever else we wanted to get out of our sight. With Herculean effort we cleared out half the room and turned the front part into a cribless nursery with a changing table, a storage shelf, and a nursing chair:

As you can see, we couldn't part with junk completely, but we hid it behind a curtain.

I'm totally in love with this little room, mainly because in it is the only chair in which I am still able to sit comfortably:

(That blue thing is a nursing pillow.) Sleeping horizontally has become a bit of a challenge, and usually I end up in here at night for a series of short naps. (Who knew the not-sleeping already starts in pregnancy?)

So, there you got it. Babies cry and eat and poop, and we're here and ready to rock them, feed them, and clean them. Well, one baby, that is.

Next time there will be knitting content again. (Baby knitting. I know I know, it's getting lame. There's light at the end of the tunnel: not only am I planning to dive into fair isle knitting, despite dw's warning, but I also want to knit a lace shawl for my Ph.D. advisor. She had to read my 403-page magnus opum four times and deserves something amazing.)