Spring Cleaning

Hmmm...it smells like fresh cut grass, the world is puddle-wonderful, I think spring is here at last!

With the first week of really nice, spring-like weather I have been feeling a strong compulsion, verging on physical panic, to organize my house (and by extension, my life). Last weekend, for example, when I should have been outside frolicking, I was rearranging my closets. It started out innocently enough, with me trying to find a box of sandals and other summer-y shoes. Then, naturally, I had to unpack the summer clothes, and then find my daughter's warm-weather stuff as well. Before I knew it, I was in full-on spring cleaning mode.

This cleaning jag feels similar, though not so intense, to the "nesting" instinct I experienced during pregnancy. It culminated the day before my daughter was born, when I could not sit still for a second because of all the imagined tasks I had to complete before the birth. I remember pleading with my husband to help me hang some ceramic hippos above the window in the nursery, so our baby would have something interesting to look at (keep in mind that newborns can only focus on things about 12 inches away from them, and it takes months for their eyesight to fully mature). Finally, I dragged out a stool to do it myself. My husband talked me down from the brink of madness (because lumbering my 9-month pregnant body onto a stool would have been madness indeed), the next day I gave birth, and the hippos were forgotten. In fact, they remain unhung to this day.

It's interesting how the change in seasons still brings back those primal "nesting" urges, even though as humans we don't necessary have our babies in the springtime.

(the painting is Spring by Alphons Mucha)