Ahh, finally, the glorious second trimester is upon us!
“But Heather,” you might be asking, “Don’t you realize that you are now in the last month of your second trimester?”
Yes, I do realize that. But you see, certain popular books (which will remain anonymous) will tell you you can expect a burst of energy upon your entry into this, the most wondrous of trimesters. You will cease to vomit. Your weight gain will pick up. You will stop having to pee with every second breath. You will channel the spirit of Martha Stewart and hand-paint your nursery walls with nontoxic vegetable dyes, painstakingly stitch breathtaking wee quilts during the downtime in the Lamaze classes you will have signed up for, and carve teensy bunnies and ducks for baby’s walls from the leftover lumber you used to craft a faux-antique armoire (which, naturally, will have a built-in changing table made from one of the fabrics used to cover that old easy chair you found lying around and converted into a shabby-chic glider with contrasting dust ruffle).
Alas, weeks 14 through 21 were wasted! Instead of buzzing about town picking out complementary fabrics and furiously working the lathe and the jigsaw, I was sleeping 12 hours a night, vomiting more days than not, and creating enough liquid gold to fill Lake Okanagan should it ever need topping off.
Now, instead of having a luxurious 12 weeks to nest, I have but four. And instead of saving every dollar so that baby could repose in cozy, overstuffed ambience reminiscent of the Ritz-Carlton, courtesy of poshtots.com, which offers time-starved non-nesters the opportunity to quarter their young in lavish opulence for the price of a mere Bentley, Chris and I have frittered money away on Christmas presents, groceries and rent.
This, of course, means baby will have to sleep not in an adorable round Stokke crib, which costs money and takes time to assemble, but in a Rubbermaid packing bin, of which we already have plenty. Ditto for the dresser, and ditto (turned upside-down) for the changing table.
And since I have but a month left in this most productive of trimesters to find the perfect complements to the black-and-red scheme of our bins, I had better get cracking, since most baby bedding seems to be created for parents who are not so constrained by the color of whatever Rubbermaid bins happen to be lying about, and thus can decorate in pastel hues and animal themes. The only animal whose coloring remotely resembles these bins is the gibbon, and I am afraid that such a theme will give our poor child a fixation later in life with brightly-colored, prominently-displayed hindquarters, which could later lead to dates with The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.
Yes, our child’s entire future is at stake in my quest to cheaply and rapidly appoint a nursery in what little I have been given of my second trimester. I may not be able to assemble quite so many coordinating fabrics as I had planned, and I may not have the time (or the woodworking equipment) to cut and lovingly paint adorable wall letters to match the nursery fabrics.
But, as blog is my witness, I will at the very least find paint to cover the black-and-red storage bin our baby will have to sleep in! After all, what else am I going to do with all this spare time? I now have the bladder of a camel and no need for sleep whatsoever. The book said so.