Are you going to mow the lawn next?

That's what Jeff asked me when I was cleaning our storm door of dog nose prints and toddler hand and face prints on Sunday while my parents and brother were down for a visit.

I NEVER nested in my first two pregnancies. I'm not sure why. I made efforts at cleaning, but not the "clean until the bleach fumes knock you out" nesting that pregnant women go through. Maybe it's because I was working while pregnant. Maybe it just was not part of my life then.

I don't consider myself to be nesting now, but our house is remarkably cleaner than it has been at any other time and I am doing most of it. Things that used to not bother me, like pet hair on sofas and hand prints on windows, do now. Sweeping my kitchen floor is now the daily routine more than once!

I do not do outdoor chores mostly because my husband has worked in landscaping, knows what he is doing, and does it very well. He was joking about mowing our lawn. In fact, he carried the joke further that since it was 80 degrees outside, I should mow the lawn and he could take a picture to show his 36 week pregnant wife mowing the lawn and send it to the newspaper to see what kind of reaction it would get. Probably no worse than in 1996 after Hurricane Fran tore Raleigh apart and on the last day of National Guard debris collection, a local news crew caught footage of my 80+-year-old great-grandmother and our across the street neighbor who was in a wheelchair bringing debris over to the collection site while my three able-bodied, teenage brothers looked on not helping...according to my brother Mike, who is a Marine now and was visiting Sunday, they were supervising the effort. I guess Jeff could use that excuse too?