Crazy With The Nesting

Painters painted our bedroom and bathroom yesterday, and are coming back for a second coat plus some smaller spaces downstairs today.

The paint fumes exiled both of us from the room, me to the fold out bed in the baby’s room, and Jill to the soft couch of sweaty sleep downstairs.

Also, since Noah managed to leak through 4 or 5 layers of sheets and pads this week, I had to re-make his bed and took the opportunity to mix-n-match some of the absorbent between-sheet layers between his bed and the crib. So I stripped and re-made the crib as well as remaking Noah’s bed.

Layered sheets is my absolute most favorite parent hack ever!

Changing wet or vomited-on sheets in the middle of the night is tiring and awful and slow. Pulling a layer of wet or gross sheets, or even two layers, takes much less time and much less work, particularly in the middle of the night.

We have two “really” waterproof layers, both lanolized wool. One is on the next-from-the-bottom layer, both to protect the mattress and to provide the alert that there can be no more putting off remaking the bed.

The other layers are more intended to be absorbent, so they can protect the next layer down of sheet. We use some of our many, many, many cotton flannel and jersey receiving blankets. I try to make sure there are two layers of fabric in the middle of the bed where leaks are most likely to happen. This is medium-effective. The wool is VERY effective. (One of the wool pads from Noah’s bed needs to be washed.)

Remaining must do tasks before Saturday morning around 6:15 am (when we leave for the hospital):

• Re-check main already-packed hospital bag.
• Pack prescriptions.
• Pack snack bag, mostly for Jill, including big container of apple juice, mostly for me. Last time the hospital ran out of the little cups of apple juice. Also include the little packets of dehydrated citrus juice.
• Pack “electronics” bag: camera & charger; laptop, charger & wireless dohickey; cell phone charger.
• Unpackage the dump truck and digger presents for Noah from mommy and baby sister and pack them too.

Thing I am contemplating doing but will probably not do unless I *really* can’t sleep:

• Gathering all of the small and most of the medium empty plastic bins that seem to be in almost every room of the house.
• Sorting the large bins of Noah’s toys into the smaller bins.
• Labeling the smaller bins with pictures and words, ie cars, trains, track, musical instruments. (Need large sticker labels. Do we have large sticker labels?)
• Putting the smaller bins on the lowest bookshelves.

Very excitingly, we found out yesterday that one of our friends who moved away will be back in town from Weds evening until Saturday afternoon! So she will get to meet Esmerelda Freugenspeigel! And take pictures back to her adorable twins, who met Noah when he was still just a few weeks old! I suspect they will all be surprised to find that “baby Noah” now outmasses both of the almost-4-year-olds by 5-10 lbs.