Going overdue with my recent pregnancy gave me time to…keep up the family tradition! My mom, sister, and I are now ten for ten on overdue babies. Cheers to consistency!
During the 39th week of pregnancy, I was so optimistic that “the baby could come any minute now!” When I got to the week before the due date, however, realism set in and I resigned myself to going overdue again. Surprisingly, this mental shift actually gave me more energy and will to do other things besides wait for labor. I opened up my Nesting List, which I’d been adding to for weeks, and was able to cross things off one by one.
For fun, starting on my due date, I began keeping track of what I was getting done, with the unwritten title of, “These programs brought to you by… being overdue!”
On my due date, I baked a batch of chocolate cupcakes, a recipe I’d been wanting to pair with my favorite strawberry buttercream frosting for months. Every month at our church there is a potluck, and I use it as my cupcake venue. If I make a whole batch of cupcakes at home, I will eat a whole batch of cupcakes. Well, minus the few that the kids and Justin will get to before I eat the rest. Danger Zone! So I don’t do that. Also, Justin doesn’t like chocolate, so it was especially imperative that this recipe combo be used for an event that would not leave leftovers for me. Enter the evening-of-my-due-date potluck. The combo was delicious, by the way. Check.
A few days before my due date, I had asked Justin to bring the big kids’ car seats inside the house, and I’d retrieved the baby car seat from the top of our closet, and set them all on the living room coffee table so I could wash the covers. I’d finished with the baby seat before the due date, as it was more pressing; we only have one. The other kids have second car seats for Justin’s car, so theirs ended up just sitting on the coffee table, grease spots and all, on display, for several days, because the day I meant to get them washed, I’d already been Nesting for hours, and Justin ordered me to go take a nap because apparently I looked exhausted.
Later, sometime between due date and birth day, I did get around to washing the big kids’ car seat covers, vacuuming the crumbs out of the shells, and reassembling them with fresh covers. I don’t think I’d washed their car seats since before we moved to Texas, almost a year ago. That cleaning was more overdue than this baby. Check.
Next item was to take the kids on a couple of Last Outings before Mommy would be on what I call “baby house arrest.” Our city has two amazing assets I love taking advantage of: the downtown library and the play pools.
The library was hands-down our favorite place to go this summer. So many books to read. So many toys to play with. New friends to make. Cold air-conditioning. Not to mention the train tracks right next to it, where we might—and usually did—see a real train go by. And it’s free!! We’d been going once a week throughout July. We got one more trip in after the due date.
The “play pools” are also magnificent. They are designed for kids in single-digit ages: only 1.5 feet deep, kid-size slides, and very inexpensive admission prices. I wish I’d discovered them earlier in the summer, because 18 inches is just deep enough to take gravity off a pregnant belly, and just shallow enough that a two-year-old can touch—yet deep enough that he can float in a puddle jumper. My kids loved splashing around at a birthday party in mid July and had been asking to go back to the play pool ever since. So, during Overdue Week when I had absolutely nothing planned ahead of time, we invited some friends and got ourselves out to try the other play pool. Even I had a good time, outdoors, which was a miracle this far into both July and pregnancy. Check.
Miryam has a super cute vintage dollhouse that she got for her third birthday from my grandparents. When we moved, several of the pieces of furniture got broken. Before and after we moved, Luke also broke more pieces. I’d let them play with it, broken, for quite some time, and then one pre-party cleanup in the Spring, I put all the pieces in a box for me to fix sometime, and there they’d sat, for months. One night of Overdue Week, the kids went to sleep early, Justin was at a meeting, and I had some gumption, so I plugged in my hot glue gun, turned on a podcast, and dumped out the box of pieces. I had everything fixed in half an hour. It was strangely, deeply satisfying to arrange the newly refurbished furniture in the dollhouse, and I could barely wait for Miryam to find it in the morning. Check.
before 
after
This one may seem trivial, but it was one that was quite urgent on my mind: methodically going through each shelf in the pantry to optimize organization and visibility. Also, throwing away the potatoes that were trying to take root in there. Oops. Check!
I needed Justin’s help with this one: we took turns overseeing / making the children clean up the playroom. The beauty of having a playroom is that I can close the door and not have to worry about it being messy; when the kids clean up their bedroom or the common living areas, they can just take the toys to the playroom, simple. But…they usually just dump the toys right inside the playroom door, so the playroom usually looks like a disaster area. Then, they don’t want to actually play in there, because there’s no floor space, so they drag toys out to the living room every day, then dump them back in the playroom every night. I’d reached my limit with this mess cycle.
Making my kids clean up a room requires near-constant supervision, and with Luke, even micromanagement. “That dinosaur right there: put it in this bucket right here.” They get distracted and digress to play so easily. (I mean, they’re 2 and 4; I assume that’s normal.) The playroom clean up took hours. I could have done it myself in far less time, but the thought of bending over repeatedly to pick things up, for even 30 minutes, sounded like a terrible idea considering my huge belly. I did have to let go of my desire for an organized playroom. I allowed the kids to toss all the toys into any toy bucket they could reach. I just wanted the floor picked up. At minimum we needed clear space for a queen size air mattress, for my mom when she arrived. By expending my Nesting energy and gumption on persisting with supervision/micromanagement, we got all the toys off the floor and I was even able to vacuum in there! Check.
I asked Luke to put the pillows back on the couch. Of this particular arrangement, he said, “I made a cake!” 
A rare sight: the clean playroom.
Luke had a smidge of OCD about his pajama pants covering his whole leg. If they rode up a bit and exposed his ankles, he would have a mini freak out, which would rob him of drowsiness and prolong bedtime. This went on for a few weeks; I had a vague sense that he needed bigger jammies. Finally one day during Overdue Week, I went to Goodwill to buy him some. Except the selection of kids’ pjs at Goodwill was astonishingly slim. Instead, we went to Target and let him pick out his own. He picked trains and dinosaurs. (No PJ Masks this time, lol.) The new jammies fit him SO MUCH BETTER. No more exposed ankles or belly button. Check.
I admit my motivation fizzled out the weekend when I arrived at the 41 week mark. Or perhaps physical exhaustion and general done-with-pregnancy-ness just took over. I recorded this clip of conversation between my hubby and me:
Me: I wish I had some motivation to do something.
Justin: Um, you are about to give birth soon. You don’t really need to be doing anything.
Justin’s is the Voice of Reason, to counter the Voice of Nesting in my head. He’s a great husband!
Only about 60% of my [ridiculously unrealistic] Nesting List got done. But that percentage would have been much lower if I hadn’t had Overdue Week to finish up a few more items. I’ll note that it is easier to find the silver linings of pregnancy when one is no longer pregnant. Hence this post. And disclaimer to anybody out there super preggo: it’s also fine to not do anything when you’re overdue. You’re totally justified. Just surviving Overdue Week is an accomplishment in itself!