Nesting Husbands and Foraging Three-year Olds

"Stow" (a.k.a. "my little stowaway") is due to arrive in the next couple of weeks, and I have been noticing some odd changes in behavior in my spouse and my youngest child.

I suppose all of us are getting ready for the change in some way (except Sky, who seems remarkably calm and relatively unfazed by the whole thing), but I never cease to be amazed by how Ren seems to internalize my hormones and express them better than I can. The first change I noticed was his incessant washing of the car. No, he doesn't take it to the car wash or get a pail of soapy water and a sponge out every day, but each morning, he goes out and cleans the windows and wipes the sides of the car so it still has that new-car look. After the third day, I pointed out that he seemed to be spending more time with the car than usual, and he said, "I want it to be clean when the baby arrives." I didn't have the heart to point out that it is supposed to rain most of next week, so the car will most likely not be sparkly when baby arrives. (I also didn't point out that baby won't be able see much beyond his nose so probably won't notice the clean car anyway.)

Then Ren started reorganizing. We went through phase one of this when we had to re-allocate rooms to fit in another kid. Ren went all out then, as well. But in the last three or four days, he has rearranged all of our storage, sorted through our medical supplies, and reorganized all of the toiletries in our bathroom.

Fortunately, my nesting instincts usually translate into increased productivity with my research, or in this case, with my fight with the community school system to get more services for Sky.

In the meantime, Pink P's survival instincts seem to have gone into overdrive. Perhaps she senses the impending usurpation of her spot as the youngest (most attention-grabbing) member of the family. This week, she has managed to find two different stashes of Sky's Halloween/Easter/B-day-party-gift-bag candy, more hidden gum (seems she didn't learn her lesson from the three-day tummy ache last time around), and Ren's chocolate. Since I wasn't here when she made these discoveries, I can't speculate as to how she did it, but some of these hiding places were not only behind locked doors, but also quite out of reach. The girl has been showing some serious ingenuity.

So, all I can say is, if people are already falling apart now, what's going to happen when the rest of them are subjected to the severe lack of sleep and inconveniences that comes with having a small baby at home? I'm already quite familiar with this since I haven't slept in days, but I am a tad worried about how everyone will react when things actually get more challenging.