The Nursery

9.11.14

     Every day we inched closer to the anniversary of Kaitlyn I felt the grief start coming in waves. It would catch me off guard where all of a sudden I was reliving the details of that day from start to finish.
     Kaitlyn's nursery had pretty much stayed untouched for the majority of the year. The exception would be that every now and then I would go into her room and look through the drawers of untouched clothes that had been prewashed and folded neatly to be welcome its new inhabitant. I had started the box of Kaitlyn things, but it held very few outfits as she never wore any of them.
     Alex and I had decided to get new carpet because the carpet throughout our house was the original that was beyond gross. It seemed like a great idea to get this taken care of before the baby gets here, but I didn't take into consideration that when you get new carpet, you have to clean out everything that is on the floor in every room.
     That included the nursery.
     Now, Alex is one of those people who believes in less is more. I, on the other hand, prefer to be completely prepared with multiple sets of everything just in case one goes bad. It makes for a very interesting living arrangement.
     Thursday it was all of a sudden time to clean out everything in the nursery, including the closet. I didn't realize it was happening until half of the contents of the closet were all of a sudden laid out in the kitchen and Alex was asking me why we had so many dang baby carriers.
     "I didn't know which one I would end up liking!" I protested to him when he tried to convince me to narrow it down to one. "And I still don't, so I think I should get to keep them all!"
      That argument didn't fly when he found the three complete pack-n-plays that I had stashed between the guest closet and the nursery closet.
      "One. You need one," he told me.
       At that point, I started crying. It wasn't because of anything Alex said, it was just that realization that I was a really over-prepared mom.
       "Why are you crying?" he asked me gently, afraid that he had hurt my feelings.
       "I am a good mom... I would have been a good mom. Look at all this stuff that I was hoarding in order to take care of her," I said between tears.
       "Of course you're a good mom," he replied.

       Eventually, we made it through all of the things in the nursery. Once the carpet was installed, we decided to rearrange some things to make it a little different for this baby than it was for Kaitlyn. In the end, it was good to purge some of the excess and focus on the things that were really needed for our new addition.