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.

Since a few days after July 2, 2009, Toph and I have been tracking the growth of Baby Desmond with the help of various books and websites. A favorite ritual is sitting down to read weekly updates in books like Your Pregnancy Week by Week or in emails from Baby Center, the subject lines of which declare “You’re X weeks pregnant!”. Honoring the allotted time for learning about what’s happening in there induces anticipation similar to the kind stirred in kids by the daily opening of an Advent calendar door to reveal the chocolate candy piece inside during the countdown to Christmas.

The updates always include a size comparison, to give you an idea of the baby’s growth. I get a big kick out of the fact that these similes are always made to food items, since food is my professional life. A short sampling:
At 6 weeks our baby was the size of a lentil bean;
At 12 weeks, a lime;
At 16 weeks, an avocado;
At 20 weeks, a banana;
At 27 weeks, a cauliflower;
At 31 weeks, my current status, Baby Center tells us that our baby weighs about as much as 3 naval oranges.
(For a complete picture slide show of size comparisons, go here)

The likening to food is helpful because you get a clear image of the size. Usually.  Sometimes, though, it’s baffling. When my friends Erika and Deacon were expecting, they wrote about a confusing comparison to shrimp:

“This one website did use a shrimp as an example a week or two ago, which was kind of weird. Are we talking a curled up shrimp? One stretched out? We talking 31/50 count shrimp? Or maybe U8 shrimp – those are pretty big.”

I had a similar experience when a book approximated Baby to a squash and another source held it up to “a small pot roast”. Not only were the comparisons seemingly so arbitrary when pitted against each other, the small pot roast analogy was just ridiculous since at the time the baby was just barely 2 pounds. I mean, if you’re going to invest in making a pot roast, it really should be bigger than that!

Oddly enough, not long ago I bought two beautiful heads of cauliflower on a Wednesday afternoon to make for a dinner gathering on Friday night. Come Thursday, when the “You’re 27 weeks pregnant!” email arrived, it read “this week, your baby weighs almost 2 pounds (like a head of cauliflower)”. This coincidence freaked me out a little bit. (Oh, but if you’re a fan of cauliflower, I did develop a tasty recipe that week for my Serious Eats column, which you can find here: Spaghetti with Roasted Cauliflower and Bacon Herbed Breadcrumbs.)

It’s been amusing learning about the baby in terms of food. Now, let’s just hope Baby likes such a variety of food when the time comes for him/her to get acquainted with it.

In times of insecurity, we grasp at the things we know we’re good at.  I figured I might not know a thing about pregnancy, but I’d have this nutrition bit in the bag.  I’m a cook, a food writer, and a recipe developer and I’m pretty focused on nutritious eating.  Our kid was going to eat right from the start.

If you learn nothing else during pregnancy, you learn that you have practically no control over the way things go down.  It is the most unpredictable time in a girl’s life (and by default, in her husband’s life…).

I quickly discovered that the things I intended to eat, the food I knew I should eat, I absolutely didn’t want to eat.  Though I made it through unscathed by morning sickness (or “all day sickness” or just “sickness” as many friends have amended the phrase), I had bouts of aversions to things.  Some days I would prepare something and when the cooking was finished, I would pack it up in the fridge and pour myself a bowl of cereal to eat instead.  One day, in the middle of summer when the produce was spilling over crates at farm stands, and ice cream was dripping down the sides of cones, and hamburgers were partying on backyard grills up and down the blocks of our neighborhood, I sat on the couch with a white plate of white food: a flour tortilla with melted mozzarella and a scoop of hummus.  No color of the rainbow looked tasty to me.

The night we found out we were going to be parents in 34 weeks, I made this pasta dish out of the things we had around: fresh tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, basil from our patio garden, a couple strips of bacon, and diced fresh mozzarella.  These are all flavors that I love…they’re also flavors I would come to wince at in the upcoming weeks.

I live for tomato season. I love to slice them, sprinkle them with salt and stack them on a piece of toast slathered with mayo or drizzled liberally with olive oil.  I go out of my way to use them up while they are in all their summer glory.  Their pal, Basil, is also always welcome and they get along famously, those two.  I had a falling out with tomato and basil, though, and for the duration of the first trimester and much of the first few weeks of the second, I didn’t want to see or smell either of them.  Totally bizarre.  I could stand the smell of bacon, but didn’t want to eat it.  I even skipped out on a BLT building contest a food writer was hosting because none of it appealed to me at all.

This arbitrary opposition spilled over into various categories of food until it became slim pickins ‘round here.  One day early on I ravenously ate a big, mult-ingredient salad, filled with all the things I was supposed to be eating. The very next day, I couldn’t stand to even remember having eaten it.  There was no rhyme or reason to it.

Things continued this way for weeks. Poor Toph got the short end of the stick.  Dinner is usually cooking, or at least contemplated by the time he’s home from work. But these days he grew used to coming home to no aroma wafting through to the front door, a dark kitchen and me on the couch.

He rallied for us, though, with pancake dinners, grilled cheese sandwiches (he makes the best) and baked potatoes until I could get it together again at the stove and the dinner bell was repaired.