Oh How the Time Flies ...

"Time Flies" courtesy of Barbara Wills Designs

I just finished moving my computer from the living room into, of all places, the kitchen. Not much choice there, my wife's computer has to come out of the bedroom to make room for the crib that I'll be piecing together tomorrow. Therefore the only place for her computer is the living room inasmuch as my mother-in-law, God bless her soul, is now sleeping there and I wouldn't be able to use my computer at the odd hours I'm inclined to if I didn't move my
computer. So, into the kitchen we go.

An odd day on the whole, one that was focused on doing lots of laundry. Of course there was the stuff we normally have to do on a weekly basis, but then there was the need to clean all of the baby's newly bought stuff and that was a funny experience. The baby's stuff wasn't washed with everything else, in fact she has her own detergent, Dreft. I never heard of Dreft before, but I suppose that just measures to some degree my parental obliviousness factor. As soon as the baby was solidly on the horizon little gems like Dreft popped up. After being told about it we found it in our local supermarket where we bought a box of the stuff. Yesterday, running through Costco, we found that it's also in liquid form so we bought a large 128 oz bottle of it there - I'm pretty sure that at this point I can do the neighborhood baby laundry for at
least a week.

But the laundry thing caught me. I never considered what goes through my mind when I took laundry out of the machines we use to clean and dry our clothes. On the whole it's a mindless activity really, at least it is for me. There are times, though, when you hit on something like, "Wow, I really like this sweatshirt and how it smells", or some recollection that's tied to a specific piece of clothing. It's a bit odder when you find yourself doing someone else's laundry as well, something I hadn't had to do for many years and now, in the last three, I've had my wife's clothes to deal with, too. There's an intimacy of a sort that goes with doing someone else's laundry, you're sharing secrets directly and indirectly, and it's been a change for me to have to mingle someone else's stuff with mine. But this baby laundry thing, that was different.

Of course the baby's not here yet, though we're at the 37th week so the baby is totally viable at this point and it's a matter of any day now. We have tons of clothing for her, from family and friends, in fact now that I think about it I'm not sure we've bought anything at all for the baby when it comes to clothes. Touching her clothes, smelling them after the first wash, and then loading them all into the laundry bag to bring them back into the apartment, was all so strange. I was handling the clothing for a person that's not here yet, that will be a major part of my life, that will be adding significantly to future loads of laundry, that ... well, you get the idea, or maybe I really can't adequately explain the whole thing. What I know is that I had this strange sense of so much changing very soon, and that it's not just computers being moved around the house that will drastically be different very soon.

I retired from the Navy four years ago, got married three years ago, started a new job as a teacher six months ago, and now we're having a baby. I must be a glutton for change, upheaval, or whatever one uses to describe pulling the carpet out from under one's legs on a fairly routine basis. I'm not sure that this is necessarily a bad thing, and on the whole I do seem to flow with the whole thing fairly well, but then it does cause me to wonder about myself and life in general, and where it's all going and the company I'll be keeping as I go along the way.