I realized a few days ago that I've done nothing - absolutely nothing - to prepare for this baby. Most women spend nine months "getting ready". I'm eight months pregnant and just haven't had time yet to engage with the fact that yes, indeed, this bump that keeps me awake at night is a baby. It needs some basics like clean clothes, diapers, a place to sleep and a place to ride in the car. I need to get with it or Jimmy is going to be out shopping instead of hanging with me after the baby is born! So, I made my list of things to do this morning...
1. Buy a carseat. Cotton Babies is sold out of the Britax Companion, so now I have to order this and pray it gets here in time.
2. Write a birth plan. I don't believe in detailed birth plans, but it really helps to have some basic things written down so the nurses have some idea of what is important to me.
3. Find my Moby Wrap and my Medela Pump In Style.
4. Make an iTunes playlist for labor.
5. Move Oscar's clothes around so we have a place to put the baby's clothes.
6. Wash the baby's clothes.
7. Find the swaddling blankets... they have to be here somewhere.
8. Put the pack and play in my room after I figure out some way to clean the mattress. It's been used by several staff babies at Cotton Babies and is probably overdue for a good cleansing experience. Any thoughts about how this could be done?
9. Pack the boys to go to Grandma's house.
10. In our dream world, we'd get the Honda Odyssey. But that's just a dream because I seriously couldn't live with myself for spending that much on a car. Sigh. I'm cheap to a fault, but we really do have to buy a car. The Outback and the Civic just won't accommodate three carseats. Andrew is still 40 pounds and 6 years from being allowed in the front seat and driving two cars everywhere just isn't practical. We're going used, but the big question is whether we get a minivan or a medium-sized SUV. I'm leaning SUV, Jimmy is leaning minivan.
11. Pack me to go to the hospital.
12. Make sure that I have all the right tea and vitamins for the last couple of weeks of pregnancy. I usually at least drink red raspberry leaf tea and take evening primrose oil. I'm adding fish oil to that cocktail and also want to be sure that we have a good stock of Emergen-C for labor.
13. Buy diapers.
This last point is the whole reason for this post. I paid $19.97 for a package of disposable diapers. And it made me sick to do it... $19.97 for 92 diapers that are all going to end up in the garbage. You're probably wondering (for good reason) why a chick who owns a cloth diaper store would go out and buy disposable diapers. When Andrew was born, I came home with a hemoglobin level of 8. I was a first time mom, anemic, exhausted from 20 hours of labor and trying to pump around the clock for a newborn who refused to breastfeed at birth contrary to every book I'd read. When Oscar was born, I developed double mastitis within two days. It took two more days before they figured out what was wrong with me and two weeks before I was back to being myself again. For obvious reasons, both boys were in disposables for a period of time immediately after we brought them home. I'm hoping for a different experience with this baby, but, the nesting thing is kicking in and, when I was making my "list", it seemed important to be at least a little prepared.
Now why am I so bothered about a silly thing like diapers? I know that $19.97 buys a 24 pack of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese that I can leave on the food pantry table at church – or that I can have Amazon.com send to someone we know struggling with grocery money. We've all seen stories on the news during the holiday season about "letters to Santa" from parents who just wanted to have enough money to put a Christmas dinner on the table for their children. We haven't lost our income and it really isn't that much money in the grand scheme of things. I just bought one package of diapers and I'm probably justified in spending the money given our history. But am I seriously THAT lazy that I can't walk to the washer with a diaper pail full of cloth diapers? Would Jesus have bought the diapers or would He have fed someone hungry? At some point, I'll dig into the heart issue behind this... but right now, I just have enough energy to pray for an uneventful birth and post-partum experience that leaves our baby in cloth diapers from the beginning. Then I can just take the package back to the store and be done with it.
In the meantime, I have to focus on getting the rest of my list done... none of it is really optional and, once again, I’m sitting here with contractions four minutes apart (don’t worry, this is normal for me at this point) and a baby due in five weeks.
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