Thursday, April 13, 2006

Nesting

Several years ago, while we were still living in Washington, I remember telling a friend one time that I had been doing some fanatic cleaning over the weekend. I remember telling her I had been scrubbing around the bathtub with an old toothbrush and that kind of thing. Her response was: "Are you pregnant?" I had no idea why she was asking... and she went on to explain this "nesting" instinct that often goes along with pregnancy. And no, I wasn't pregnant at the time. Just a cleaning fanatic.

Now I know what she means. All of a sudden I have this fanatical desire to get our house in order. There is a logical reason for this, considering our living quarters here in Basel are not huge, which means we need to rearrange furniture to make room for all the new baby stuff that will be moving in. In addition to our bedroom, we have one other large bedroom which is currently used as a guest room/office/Kirk's closet. Please excuse me, I forgot to mention that Grady thinks this is his room. Soon it will be a guest room/office/Kirk's closet/baby room. Grady will no longer have his a room.

So last weekend I started going through drawers and cupboards and boxes, and I'm amazed at the amount of junk we've accumulated in 2 years! I found some old pictures of this place when we first moved in, and we were quite clutter-free at the time. I feel this tremendous need to de-clutter at this moment. I have spent all of today continuing my "nesting". I cleaned out a couple kitchen cupboards after discovering the arrival of the annual Basel ants (yuck), I ironed a million shirts, I sorted through all of the baby "stuff" we already have (a lot!), put contact paper in the drawers of what will become the baby dresser, and sorted through a ton of my clothes that will not fit me again until next winter (if then...). Those are all being moved into the basement.

The biggest accomplishment of all was cleaning all the floors. I have a confession to make. I haven't cleaned the floors since I fired our cleaning lady. That was 6 months ago. I mean, I vacuum all the time (how can you not when you have a black lab that sheds continuously), but I never mop. I hate cleaning the floors. A couple days ago I bought a new mop contraption (and the corresponding bucket and cleaning solution) and I may no longer dread cleaning the floors! It worked like a charm! It seemed like a quite an expensive set of cleaning materials when I bought them, but now I know it's worth it. The floors will be regularly cleaned from now on.

I have a very good reason to be in a rush to get some of this cleaning and nesting done today. On our way back from our long Easter weekend in Bavaria (we leave tomorrow morning) we will be picking up a very special visitor at the Zurich airport! Dave is coming to Switzerland! Dave is one of our very bestest friends from DC, and Kirk and Dave have known each other for about 20 years. Is that right, boys? Dave was supposed to visit us in June 2004, but ended up having to change his plans at the last minute after learning that I had to unexpectedly spend the summer caring for my Mom in Wisconsin while Kirk was traveling for work. FINALLY... the day has come... and Dave will be here next Tuesday. We're very excited for his visit. We're also honored that he will be kicking off his 10-week around-the-world tour by starting at our place! I know that people from other parts of the world are known to take months at a time for travel, but this is highly unusual for Americans. It will no doubt be the trip of a lifetime for Dave and we're thrilled to be able to share in it!