Nesting

Expectant cats, rodents, birds, and dogs develop a marvelous burst of manic energy to ready their "nests" just prior to childbirth. This may mean nothing to you, but means a lot to me.

By a quirk of evolutionary fate, human beings are often proud of being different from even our closest cousins in that chimps don't have the ability to reason. Hard as it is for us to imagine, nevertheless, the nesting instinct encoded in the nucleotides of our feathered or four-legged friends of the animal kingdom has been sealed in our DNA, too. There is simply no reasoning when the compelling nesting urge catches us.

I came to accept this shared nesting flurry among all members of the animal kingdom when we're expecting the arrival of our baby. My wife and I – oops, to be honest, the former – clean every crevice of the home, put together cribs without assistance, climb the ladder, go through all our cabinets, set up the baby's room, and do everything at an astoundingly effective tempo. Yeah, yeah. I know you might rightly scratch your heads, but I'm talking about Olympic gold level. Incredible.

Pregnancy folk lore and old wives tales have it that hammer and nails are strictly forbidden at home throughout the pregnancy. I couldn't see why that matters. In fact, I nearly lost my temper when the worker suggested not to carry out decoration last month. Call it superstition if you wish. Not that there will be anything wrong with your baby, I should emphasize, if you break the taboo. After I had shrugged off the spasm of temper tantrums, I started to think about the wisdom of the folklore. Well, it could have been meant to give us a brake to the nesting instinct.