I’d heard about nesting before pregnancy became part of my life.  It’s loosely defined as an expectant mother’s intense urge to prepare and organize before the birth of a baby. Supposedly pregnant female animals also exhibit nesting behaviors.  The instinct, which is said to be prompted by both biological and emotional cues, is explained as a survival mechanism in some way: if everything is in order when baby arrives, the shipshape environment will give him or her the best shot at healthy growth and survival.

I’m fascinated by the commonality and consistency of the urges described. Women confess hanging out of windows to clean the outside panes, frantically scrubbing toilets and floors, flipping out on husbands to finish home improvements, obsessively laundering and compulsively cleaning. I’ve wondered if and how it would manifest in me (I am not a passionate housecleaner under normal circumstances).

I was browsing a series of comments by moms-to-be on a BabyCenter.com community board and it was flush with matching stories about missions of cleanliness.  In the past month, I have done more laundry than maybe ever in my life, and the thought of putting Baby in a dirty tub gives me the heebeejeebees, and I’m surprised that all the tiny clothes we have are washed and neatly folded in the dresser already.  The surest sign of nesting for me, though, has been all the activity in the kitchen.

About a month or so, I went on a freezer cleaning tear, emptying it of content that started to look the way our car does outside in the midst of today’s blizzard: covered with frost and useless.  I threw out recipe development remnants and lingering, almost-empty ice cream cartons.  I thawed stock and put it to use, added soup to the dinner menu to eat what had been suspended in time from a bigger batch cooked weeks earlier.  I cleaned out storage containers that we’d been looking for and got ready to fill them all up again.

My nesting instinct has materialized into a stockpile of frozen prepared food for the initial weeks of newborn exhaustion when I can’t quite make it to the kitchen to cook.  Reserves of homemade food may help us feel remotely sane or exhibit some semblance of normal as we struggle through sleep deprivation and the inevitable bewilderment of early parenthood.

The current inventory includes: several quarts of chicken stock and turkey stock, pulled pork, smoked turkey and black beans, flank steak, chicken, pasta sauce, chili, vegetable curry, vegetable stew, a sliced Italian boule, pasta fagiole, butternut squash-apple soup and cauliflower soup from a friend, a few pounds of cooked dried black and white beans, and chocolate chip cookie dough.

I’ll keep cooking and stashing as long as I can stand being in the kitchen (though a few weeks ago I was at the stove, belly facing a simmering pot and Toph exclaimed, “Don’t burn the baby!”). Hopefully I’ll have the capacity and energy to thaw what’s cooked when the time comes.

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