After meeting Ida Bell, my grandmother had taken a new lease on life. She was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed now, instead of lethargic and slower moving.
Though, I felt like a lot of her attitude also had to do with Nettie and her arrival back in town.
Nettie had a way of keeping everyone on their toes, and she refused to let my grandmother go peacefully. She wanted her here for as long as possible, and she certainly wanted her to meet our daughter.
Our daughter that would be here in less than eight weeks.
Just the thought had my stomach somersaulting inside my belly.
“Ida Bell says that you need to stop telling Koen to keep an eye on her.” Nettie giggled. “Your grandmother says that her life is now complete without Gail at the estate. And Eddy just told me she was thinking about getting pregnant, but she wanted to see me have the baby first before she decided anything concrete.”
“Sounds like a solid plan on Eddy’s part,” I teased. “And tell Ida Bell I had nothing to do with Koen. He’s an adult that controls his own actions.”
The rest of the day went about as expected when I was working at my practice, but when I got home, it was to find our living room a wreck.
“What is all this?” I asked as I tried and failed to take it all in.
“That’s a bouncer,” she said as she sat in the middle of all the chaos.
“And this?” I asked, tapping my toe against a metal contraption.
“That’s the shelf for the baby’s room,” she answered.
“And that you’re in the middle of?”
“The crib.”
“And why is it all out at once?” I wondered.
“Well.” She grinned sheepishly. “I started out doing the bouncer. But there were some parts I didn’t know where they went. So I moved to the shelf. Same thing happened there. Then I moved to the crib…and well, I just ended up taking everything out and now I don’t know what to do.”
So that was how we spent our next several hours.
We got the crib put together that my dad had said he would help me with later this week. Then we got the bouncer put together that was quite a bit harder than I felt like it should be.
The shelf went up easily, though it would’ve been better if I had Denver here like I’d intended so that we could get the other shelving done as well.
“We need a bigger room,” she admitted when all the things were in the baby’s room that was right across the hall from us.
My grin was wicked as I said, “Or we need to scale down all the shit we have?”
She scoffed. “Who would want to do a silly thing like that?”
The next day, our conversation from the previous night continued.
“But we could get a brand-new wall cabinet that we can hang some of her clothing in. And on the top shelves, we could put all the diapers and wipes people are dropping off in droves. Then we could…
“Nettie,” I said. “This is one child. She doesn’t need that much stuff!”
She snorted. “Keep telling your family that. Or my sister. Or…”
The doorbell rang, interrupting what she was about to say.
“I’ll get it,” she suggested. “You need to clean up all this trash so I don’t have to bend down.”
I snorted out a laugh and watched her go.
If you didn’t know that she was pregnant, you wouldn’t be able to tell.
