Susan and Mark to share gold medal for "Nesting"

Mark here. Wow, less than 100 days to go. Nine months seemed like an eternity at first, but now we're starting to realize how much we have left to do to prepare ourselves (and our apartment) for this new, little human being.

As little as they are, babies seem to come with many accessories and so we've been making room by cleaning (I believe the technical term is "nesting"). We had numerous boxes of "stuff" in the basement. Here is a sampling:

• Every single page of school notes from elementary school to college
• Every greeting card we ever received
• 6 boxes of books that are either no longer relevant or that we'll never have time to read
• VHS tapes - movies and home videos
• 3.5" disks
• 5.25" disks
• Iomega ZIP disks
• Old decorations we'll never use
• Ancient electronics like film cameras and cassette players

We've spent the last couple of months either scanning, digitizing, converting, donating, giving away, recycling, or trashing all of this stuff. After that, we completely reorganized our basement to make room for the inevitable overflow of toys, clothes and other baby accessories.

With the basement all cleaned up, our next step is to start cleaning out the office, which will become the nursery. We'll get rid of even more things and move a few things to the living room. Then, we'll paint the nursery and start buying some new baby furniture.

Phew! Who knew this baby thing could be such hard work?