Building a nest - #125

Bowerbird beware.

For all the trash we put out in the world, there is the occasional collector. Magpies, crows, and their corvid brethren all have a penchant for trinkets. Here is a magpie making a deposit of one bottle cap in exchange for one kernel of food. Here is a crow paying for his breakfast with a fiver. Of course, this isn’t really collecting so much as an exchange of goods, but there is one true collector: the bowerbird. 

The bowerbird can be found in the upper treetops of New Guinea and Australia, but their art collections can be found on the ground. When it’s time for the males to find a mate, they get to work on the forest floor building their bowers — elaborately decorated stick tunnels meant to impress the ladies. Like any designer, they experience trends. Where they used to decorate primarily with berries and flowers, trash has become the trend du jour. It’s easy to find, given that there’s plenty of it. 

Bowerbirds line the inside floor of the tunnel with broken glass, bottle caps, and other shards of unwanted human garbage, and they create a sort of landscaping with their other collected elements around their bower. Once all the branches have been tucked neatly into the bower and all the trash is just so, they’re ready for guests.

But as every interior decorator knows, right up until the house is finished, it is a mess. 

In altricial mammals (where the young are hatched or born helpless), nesting behaviors include nest-site selection, building said nest, and then of course defending the nest. Given that I am 30 weeks pregnant, I have entered my own nesting phase. And like the bowerbird, it feels like there is an explosion of trash before the nest is ready. 

Of course bowers are just sex dens. The birds bang, and the soon-to-be-mom flies off to a more sensible nest up in the trees and away from predators, while the male protects and redecorates his bower for years. We’re going for a mix of the two. We did our nest-site selection: small town, big mountains, lots of trails for a young bird to explore. Then we “built” our nest, or rather sunk every penny we had into convincing a geriatric bird to sell us his. And now, we’re in defense of the nest, which I think for humans translates into “make it nice” since we pretty much obliterated any predators.

Make it nice includes things like put a dog in the house, make a room for the baby, collect all the things the baby will need, collect all the things we will need to not lose our minds with said baby, make sure dog is house trained, teach dog things like sit stay down off come wait, have a place where other people who love the baby can stay so you can get away from the baby, you get the idea.

The initial phase of “make it nice” is an explosion, especially since the person more obsessed with making it nice needs to nap for 2 hours a day because they are also making a baby. Nesting is a transitional phase, a preparation, the kitchen before the meal. And every moment of the day that we are not actively chopping an ingredient, I am losing my mind. Not because we’re losing time or failing, but simply because I am not a person of durings. I am a person of afters.

Durings are rarely heralded outside of mental health posts begging you to enjoy the journey itself. We are a society of befores and afters. Even a before has beauty, so ripe with potential. A during is just… a mess. It’s a mixed vision and everyone who sees it knows the glaring reality of a during: sometimes they just never become afters. Sometimes they stay durings forever. Obviously this is also true for befores, but durings are tainted. They get painted with hope, and that hope can fade. The only people who like the color of faded hope are ambulance chasers and house flippers.

So today, we’re enjoying the journey, and I’m sharing some of the prep to come.

The Baby’s Room

Otherwise known as the second bedroom and my sometimes office.

A few things to note about this room:

• that is not one basket next to my desk, it is two stacked baskets, because when they’re unstacked, Jibs carries them around in his mouth. With two, they come too heavy. He is a basket thief.

• Also that dog bed on the human bed is not for Jibs. It’s for Link. Remember that Link has a strangely deformed butt that the renowned veterinary experts 8 hours across the state had never seen before and had no idea what was happening? Well, that butt is leaking. It’s leaking all over the house. No one knows what it’s leaking — just some non-odorous, only mildly viscous, clear liquid — but this is his favorite place to lay on the bed, so I’m trying to get him to leak into this washable dog bed instead of the very nice duvet cover that I am tired of taking off and putting on and taking off and putting on.

• The Chinese Fan Palm has root rot. I’m desperately trying to save it. That’s why it looks so pathetic.

• The Ikea hospital cart sitting in the middle of the room is because I am in the middle of trying to put together a shared postpartum/baby changing cart so everyone’s bodily fluid problems can be managed from one station.

• All of this furniture has to be moved into the basement, which isn’t finished.

• I am genuinely so stoked on this mural we put up, but if you look closely, you can see the untrimmed edges. That’s because I am making the frame myself because can you imagine the cost of a frame this size? So for $40, my materials are arriving piecemeal to the Home Depot located 1.5 hours away. One piece has arrived, and they’ll only keep it for me until Tuesday, so let’s hope the other pieces also arrive by then.

• Also, ugh, I know this is temporary, but the mural not matching with the existing decor is driving me insane even though I know this will get fixed.

• The nursing pillow and the bin of blankets remain out so the cats can get bored of fucking with them before I need to use them.

The Main Bedroom

Here we are in the sanctuary that is the main bedroom.

• The door is still taped shut for winter, which is why that space heater is next to the bed. We honestly timed this baby pretty well, because that space heater gets put away ~two weeks before that space gets claimed by a bassinet that’s still in its box in the garage.

• That mound in the middle of the bed is my pregnancy noodle. I cannot wait to sleep on my stomach again.

• The pillow on the dresser? The poof? The clothes draped all over the chair? The cat bowl also on the dresser? The litter box in the corner? This is all because if we leave everything where it was, which is namely not in our bedroom, then Jib growls at the cats when they come in the room at night. But! If we lock them all four pets in our room together at 9pm, everyone sleeps peacefully. Banzet takes the chair that has to be covered in shit lest he tear it to shreds, Finn sleeps on the pillow on the dresser because that’s his pillow, and he needs to be somewhere the dog can’t reach, and Link and Jibs take turns between the poof and the actual bed, and they do this all night. Anyway I’m not sleeping great because our room is a zoo, but I was sleeping worse when the door was open and Jib growled any time someone moved. This is our version of crate training. We’re just all in the same crate.

The Front Hall

Aka the pile. The only thing to note here is that it’s a part of our house that doesn’t get used in the winter because you can’t open the front door anymore. The snow drift over the front door is unshoveable. It’s a force of nature and it simply gets to stay for the season until the big melt when it becomes useable again. So while it’s non-functional, this hallway becomes the dumping zone. I would just take these things to donation, but they all have to go to different donation zones, lest they get thrown away. What you can’t see is the heap of electronics, batteries, and the like that need to be driven an hour and a half away. (Mind you, not in the direction of the Home Depot, but in the other direction.)

If there is one thing about my nesting that is dissimilar to a bowerbird’s nesting, it is that I am trying to get rid of as much trash as possible. I have had to stop myself from just getting rid of half my closet merely because it doesn’t fit over a pregnant belly. It shouldn’t! But my compulsive desire to collect and clear threatens everything in it’s path.

Whatever. This is fine.

The Kitchen

I love the kitchen. I love what we did with the kitchen. I mean, this was the kitchen before, a true before:

It hard to argue with the after, if only because it is so, so much cleaner. But still, nesting persists:

• Just out of frame to the left is a stack of cleaning products. Because Jib is working on house training and Link is leaving a snail trail all over the house, we’re just constantly cleaning. Which is fine! We’ve been cleaning all year!

• The array of pinecones on the counter is because we filled every plant with pine cones to get the cats to stop fucking with them. But then we brought home Jibs. and Jibs was like “OMG ARE THESE PINECONES FOR ME?” and started chewing every pine cone he could find. Mind you, we have over 50 plants now, so it’s a lot of pine cones. And he’s not allowed to chew on pine cones because even if the shards were safe in his mouth, they are painful to step on! But we spent all this time collecting all these pine cones, so now they’re just sitting on the counter, half eaten.

• About two weeks ago, Ben was like “we have to stop leaving shit all over the bar.” And so we started leaving shit on the bar stools. The first stool is for Jibs’s stuff, the second is for my stuff, and the third is for stuff that needs to go in the car. Ben still leaves his stuff on the bar.

• We’re going to need to do so much food prep. So much.

The Mud Hall

It was hard to know what angle to take in this hallway.

• Should it be where Jibs is currently heading, under the staircase, to the massive amount of junk we’ve just shoved under there? It’s not that you can’t have a mountain of junk somewhere in your house — it’s more that we have three. And I am worried about tackling even just one of them before the gremlin arrives.

• Or should I have taken this photo in the other direction, where heaps and heaps of towels are preparing for laundry because our washing machine broke and drained all over the floor.

• Should it be of the pile of mouse poop?

• Should I have just pointed it at the non-existent ceiling which is where all the mice are coming from? You’d think three cats would have this handled, but they can’t handle it when they’re locked in the bedroom because someone won’t stop growling at them when they’re on the prowl.

Even the three shittiest wines in the world sitting on the ice maker are looking pretty good right now.

The Guest Room

This was once a more unfinished basement, as you can see below.

So we’ve paneled over the cinder block, put up a ceiling, put up a wall between this room and the garage (which it was previously just open to), but this room needs to be finished by May so humans can pamper us while we’re sapped of life. That means get everything that is in it, out of it, so we can install a floor, some baseboard heating, finish the lighting and ceiling paint, and then move the furniture that is upstairs to this downstairs.

Ben does not seem humbled in the slightest by how much stuff is in this room, and I am trying to ride his confidence to the ends of my worries.

So that is our during. That is “the journey” and it is made easier by how in love with our house I am. I love this house. I cannot believe it’s ours. I cannot believe when you look up the deed for this house, my name is on it. The miracle of our timing on getting this house is still something I wake up and think about. Even when it gets in the 50s inside, even when nothing works, even when you feel a mouse run across you atop the comforter at night, I love this house.

I guess that makes the defending part of nesting pretty easy.