I've spent the past few days terrorising myself over the unconquerable mess in my papers, photos and computer files.

I've even lost the ability to write because it feels like the mess around me is spreading into my head.

Every time I try to clean up, I give up after five minutes - there's just too much of everything. A backlog.

(Speaking of backlog, this blog seemed messy, too, so I updated the links yesterday, adding a bunch of Russian- and Ukrainian-language livejournals I sometimes read. But it's not enough: I wish there existed an easy way to sort all entries by categories...)

The apartment, except for the closets and drawers, looks fine - but that, somehow, leaves me indifferent, neither happy, nor unhappy.

I've spent the past three hours - or maybe even more - opening various folders, then closing them, feeling absolutely desperate.

And then I remembered something I'd read about a while ago: the 'nesting instinct' women experience during pregnancy. I rushed to Google and found this:

Around the fifth month of pregnancy, the "nesting" instinct can set in. This is an uncontrollable urge to clean one's house brought on by a desire to prepare a nest for the new baby, to tie up loose ends of old projects and to organize your world. [...]

I'm 25 weeks pregnant now.

It's nice to know that what I'm going through is normal - though how can an 'uncontrollable urge' be normal?..

Funny to think of what I worried about when I was imagining getting pregnant: How am I going to quit smoking? Will I be able to learn how to fall asleep lying on my side? Will I have morning sickness, or evening sickness, or round-the-clock sickness?

I quit smoking in a week; I haven't even noticed that I no longer need to lie on my stomach to fall asleep; I haven't been sick a single time. Thank God.

But - I've grown so big, I have only two more dresses left to wear, and my mama, who normally makes all the nice clothes for me, is very busy and exhausted doing a remont in Kyiv; I'm so big that even my doctor says it's not okay; every time I go out, I hate this country for the lack of clean public bathrooms; and now I've got this uncontrollable nesting instinct...

But I'm not complaining, no. I'm too superstitious to really complain.

I just wish I had a secretary or something, to help me clean up the mess in my files.

***

A wonderful distraction today has been Danny Gregory's text about his wife's pregnancy - in The Morning News, one of my very favorite online magazines:

[...]

So many of Patti’s clothes don’t fit. Her pantyhose cut deep incisions around her abdomen. She struggles to get into her skirts and leaves them unzipped.

She is excited to have discovered that my shirts fit her perfectly, so I guess we’ll be dressing alike through the spring. I can’t believe I have the proportions of a pregnant woman. I’ve got to get back to the gym.

[...]

...I've been wearing Mishah's shorts for about two weeks now...

Anyway, Danny Gregory's beautiful blog is one of my favorites, too - Everyday Matters. And the text I've read today is actually a book chapter, published in installments in The Morning News every two weeks.