Optimistic? Stupid? You be the judge

I did something this weekend that I swore I would never do again. I set up the Pad's nursery.

True, we'd left the furniture in there from before, and I'd bought those Alice in Wonderland pictures to hang up. But for a year now, the crib's been in pieces, the bedding's been packed away in a plastic tub, the walls have been bare, and the bouncy seat and swing have been gathering dust.

I don't know what came over me. In fact, yesterday morning I actually cried for Joseph for the first time in a long time - because I saw some pictures I'd taken last spring of the newly completed nursery. Coming home to that empty room so lovingly and hopefully set up was one of the hardest things about the whole ordeal. So why would I do that to myself again?

I still don't know. Part of it is that I realized that the closer I get to the Pad's birth date, the more I seem to detach the pregnancy from the idea of an actual baby. The more preoccupied I got with the physical discomforts of late pregnancy, the less I thought about the baby herself. I'm sure it's a self-preservation mechanism, but somehow it didn't seem right. Part of me feels that this baby deserves as much anticipation as her brother had. So the next thing I knew, I was in the nursery, dragging things out of tubs and hanging up pictures. And Andy, who had originally wanted to wait to set up the crib until the Pad came home, even got into it - maybe for the same reason. He even offered to put the crib together without my saying anything.

Once I got started, I couldn't stop. So today the nursery has a crib, with clean bedding, and pictures on the walls. I threw the gray-with-dust pads from the bouncy seat and swing into the wash and then put them together again, with fresh batteries. I washed a load of newborn onesies and folded them into the dresser drawers. I organized all the baby odds and ends I'd just tossed into the drawers or the back of the closet.

I just have to keep telling myself that doing all this won't CAUSE anything bad to happen. It feels good to walk by and see the room looking so cheerful and ready for a baby - it's really the nicest room in the house - but it also scares me. A lot.