18w, 3d - 19w,4d to go.

I am officially nesting.

I think the instinct kicked in before Christmas, but I was too sick for the first half of this "vacation" to do anything about it. (I got 9 days off work for the holiday - my Christmas "bonus" from the company.) So yesterday, finally feeling better, I kicked it into high gear and started working on the nursery.

Now, the room where the nursery will be has served many purposes over the year and a half we have lived here. It's been a storage room, a closet, a dumping ground for randomness, and an office. The office has been deconstructed, leaving just the piles of mess behind. It was so bad, at one point we just closed the door so we wouldn't have to look at it anymore.

But, yesterday, I went in there and dug in, digging through the mess and throwing way all sorts of stuff. I got about half done. By this, I mean I picked up everything I determined to be trash, threw it away, and shoved everything else on one side of the room, so it looks half clean.

I then spent about 45 minutes and about six gallons of carpet cleaner getting stains and stickyness out of the carpet. (At one point, when the room was an office, and when Rudy was a kitten, he pulled a huge glass of orange juice off my desk, and we had no steam cleaner at the time to clean it up, so it left the carpet stained and sticky.) That half of the room looks phenomenal now. The carpet looks as if it had never been touched. It is incredible.

The other half of the room still looks like a bomb hit it, but at least I feel better about it.

We also put together the toy chest that we got for Christmas from the baby's great-grandma, and threw a bunch of toys in it (mostly toys that had been mine, but that I'm passing onto the baby - including my Lolly and Bear Bear - my first doll and teddy bear. I just hope the little guy/girl takes good care of them so he/she can pass them down to my grandbabies.) So, one part of the room officially looks like a baby's room.

The rest of the room, in theory, should not take too much time or effort. The biggest part of it all is going to be the closet. The baby is getting a very large walk-in closet that has served as a hiding place for my dirty little secret - I am the world's worst pack-rat. I cannot bear to part with anything, so the whole weeding out what we literally DON'T need and keeping what we DO need has been difficult. But, I've made progress. At one point, the closet was so full that you had to shove really hard to get the door open. It's not that way anymore.

I imagine that sometime within the next month (Yes, month), that room should start to look habitable again. I had a goal of having it done in nine days, but that just didn't work out.

I took some "before" pictures of the nursery to compare and contrast to the "after" pictures, but I'll save everything for when the job is actually done. (Minus all the furniture, but we'll save taking pictures of that for the days leading up to baby jellybean's arrival.)

That's the latest and greatest in baby news from here. Hope everyone's Christmas and New Years are fantastic!