Nesting. Or panicking.

It suddenly dawned on me that I'm almost 34 weeks pregnant and the baby's room is still essentially being used as a storage closet. Keeping the door closed has proven to be a remarkably effective avoidance strategy, but I'll be 34 weeks on Monday and let's not forget that my goal was to have everything in order before R heads off for his two-week course in Zurich. That starts two weeks from Monday, people, and right now the baby's room is holding R's military equipment, my loom, a broken chair, several ceiling lights that we have not yet mounted (we're slow on the lighting, remember?), three bags of books I plan on donating to...somebody, the ironing board, some pictures we haven't hung, a lot of my pre-pregnacy clothes, and some other random stuff.

Lots of stuff. None of it is actually baby-related, of course, but there's lots of stuff in there.

So today I devoted the better part of the afternoon to organizing the easy stuff (as in no heavy lifting), including washing Small Boy's old size 50's and 56's (of course, I don't have a chest of drawers to put the clothes in, but at least the baby has some clean stuff in the house). This meant going through the box labelled "[Small Boy] - old." I found the little mittens knitted by R's grandmother, the outfit Small Boy wore home from the hospital, the emergency onesies R bought when I called his cell in a panic to report that Small Boy had just peed all over his last clean outfit (it turns out infant boys pee all over themselves, and you, and the floor and the wall and ceiling if you're not careful). His little red suit where the shirt and the pants are from slightly different dye lots. Little socks, such little socks (or as Small Boy calls them "liiiiniii socks"*) that I can't believe his feet were ever that small, that he was ever such a wee little bundle.

Small Boy will be three in January. How did that happen? How did he go from the boy who wore those tiny socks, those little knitted booties, to this boy who can pull on his rubber boots all by himself - and even get them on the right feet? Who shuffles through the dry leaves and collects acorns? Who can steer an electric bumper-car all by himself? Who loves all things Feuerwehr (fire department)? Who eats steak, for goodness sake. Steak! Just yesterday he had no teeth and I met all his needs and now he eats steak and the whole world is barely big enough for him.

Little socks, little booties all left so far behind.

When?

PJs then and now.

* Another half Swiss-half English utterance - "little" in Swiss would be chli or chlini; Small Boy drops the initial ch and just says li or lini.