When my wife was expecting our firstborn, she got to a point in her pregnancy where she became obsessive about our house being perfect for the baby.
- I’d come home and find that she had changed something in the living area, from the coffee table to the couch; everything seemed to be shipping out faster than the baby was coming.
She called it nesting. We were going to have a winter baby, and in the last month, she mentioned that the routine heating maintenance was not enough because we’d had the HVAC professional perform more than one heating repair on the furnace. She feared the heating device would give in on a cold night and the child would suffer hypothermia. Her anxiety got to me, and we bought new heating equipment from the local heating company, which is how we ended up with an electric heater. I thought that was the end of her fears about the HVAC installation until I found her shopping for a new fireplace at the heating dealership online store. I asked her about it, and she mentioned that the wooden one was unsafe to have with a child because it increased the risk of burning and other fire-related accidents. I’m not a heating technician, so I had no knowledge of how to convince her otherwise, and getting rid of it or not using it were not options for either of us. We called the heating specialist who’d installed the other new device and got a recommendation to change from wood to an electric heating source which would be clean and guarded by the glass. The glass could still burn the kids if touched while hot, but we also got to control the temperatures using a thermostat. Glad we did all that with the first kid.