Things we did this weekend and so far this week:

• Retrieved and assembled used car seat from cousin
• Assembled frame for stroller that accommodates car seat
• Finished cutting out wooden letters of the baby’s name
• Had final baby shower
• Assembled various gifts from shower
• Did various returns and trades from all showers, getting ride of duplicates and some of the non-registry gifts that we knew we wouldn’t get any real use out of
• Bathed dog
• Cleaned the hell out of the house
• Mowed lawn
• Picked up and assembled toddler table and chairs and Pack and Play play-yard/bassinet
• Reinstalled operating systems on two computers
• Got wireless working (at last!) on my Linux laptop (one of the OS reinstalls)
• Learned vaguely how to operate stopwatch
• Felt guilty about freeloading two free meals off my visiting parents
• Got unexpected Target gift card from coworkers
• Took lots of clothes to Salvation Army bin

Things remaining to be done before the baby’s arrival:

• Change air circulation filter (I forget what this thing’s actually called)
• Review contents of bag packed for hospital
• Review birth plan to make sure I’m on the same page as M
• Spend unexpected Target gift card, probably on things to make the back bedroom look not quite so empty
• Get epidural (for M)
• Overcome abject fear at the prospect of becoming a parent

It takes a lot of preparation to have a baby. For example, last weekend (another busy one that I didn’t fully document), I knew that I needed to make room in our room for the Pack and Play that we were either going to get as a late baby gift or to purchase. To make said room, I needed to move a bedside table. I wanted to move it to the office, the floor of which was covered with papers and piles of books that wouldn’t fit on my already-overflowing shelves. So I got up Saturday morning, built a 6-foot bookshelf, filled it with books, threw away all the office trash, moved a desk from the office out into the garage where it now serves as an auxiliary woodworking table, moved the bedside table to the office, and cleaned up the bedroom to make room for the Pack and Play, which fits perfectly where the table had been sitting.

It was rather like one of those tile puzzles where there’s one little tile missing and you slide all the tiles around one slot at a time to try to make sense of the picture or to get the numbers in the right order.

I spent a lot of time this weekend fitting plastic pieces together and clipping tags and screwing things together. Major items lending varying levels of frustration to my weekend were a vibrating/massaging/musical baby bouncer chair, a baby swing, a toddler table and chairs (we don’t need them just yet, but they were on our list for the future and we got them), the Pack and Play, and the stroller. Our baby’s room has gone from looking sort of empty to looking almost overstuffed. The closet in particular is jammed full of clothes and diapers and booster seats and Diaper Geni refills and bottles and wipes and a thousand other things. I’m not complaining, incidentally — it’s just amazing how much we’ve accumulated how quickly. Just a few years ago, we were living in a 400-square-foot rat-hole of an apartment. When we upgraded to a 900-square-foot apartment, we thought we had plenty of room to grow, but we quickly filled it all up. Now we’re in 1650 square feet and are beginning to tax the seams a bit after not quite two years. It’s funny how stuff piles up.

As for having the baby, I’m pretty much ready. I had been saying that I needed a few more weeks. And I could still use some time to read and knock some other non-baby-related to-dos off my list, but I’m past the point at which I feel like I need that time. I’m ready for the baby to get here, to slide like that last tile into the nearly-organized …blah blah.