"You cannot find peace by avoiding life." -Virginia Woolf

Today my husband and I began the process of sorting through Ben's baby stuff and thinking about where all this stuff, and more, will actually go. *

Everything's been getting piled up in the room under the stairs. Sounds ominous, doesn't it? Really it is the room where our oil tank and hot water heater live, and the place with a small area that became the catch-all storage spot for mounds of quickly outgrown/no-longer-needed baby stuff. A lot was passed on to us and we've since passed it on, but we saved some things - those things given to us and some that we purchased - I remember thinking as I piled them away how we'd give them away when we had a girl but they would be cute should we have another boy.  

I would have thought that that box with items from my desk at my last job would have been in the garage with most of our other stuff. And I think this is why I'm already feeling the urge to nest. Ben was born 3 weeks and 1 day early, in September of 2009, almost 2 weeks before we moved to this house, so while I'm sure we wouldn't have really been moved in, our plan was that he would arrive after the point of packing/passing papers/moving/some unpacking. Instead we somehow did it with help and our 10 day old, "late pre-term" baby. Since then, we've been  just sort of unpacking what we've needed and moving in slowly. What's in place is what's in place. The rest is in the garage or under the stairs.

It was perfect - that time, that September, with its many visits to the pediatrician's office and lactation consultants. We often, when visiting friends, drive by the spot where we lived, where we all spent those days together--Ben and I camped out in our room--the last of many years for me and my husband being loaded quickly into boxes by our own moms in the rooms surrounding. C doing whatever he could to help wherever at all times. I think about the music we played, what we always seemed to hear in the car as we drove to appointments in that unseasonably warm September. I remember spending what was the last of 8 or 9 birthdays there, turning 33, eating pizza among boxes with my sweet new baby a week after his birth.

And while the last almost 2 and a half years have been anything but organized, I love that that each day we've inhabited this place, it has been a life as the 3 of us. It will always be one of the things that only we and Ben shared, like the smell of his first days. It will be just one of the things that I feel very grateful for.   

* This ultimately means the work-at-home/writer/mama may (likely, will) lose her office/working writing space with door that closes and room for bookshelves. Ahhh well...