The Heartbreak Factor - Part Four

Putting the keys into the lock, I twisted them slightly until the door flung open right in front of me. Walking in through the front door, I sighed to myself as I realised how much work I had to do. Chloe wasn’t the tidiest of people, but she never let housework get on top of her now she had moved in with Josh so it was surprising the state of the hallway as I let myself in. There was clothes flung all over the place and a pizza box still left on the hallway cabinet. 

After taking a quick look around the house, I walked into the kitchen and grabbed some black bin bags from the drawer. I wasn’t meant to be here. Really, I should have been catching up with sleep since a three hour nap at the hospital through the night wasn’t an ideal sleep, but I wanted to make the house nice and family-friendly for when Chloe and baby Joel were discharged the following day. Josh and Chloe hadn’t even began to decorate the nursery yet so it was inevitable that today would be a long and busy day for me. I sure had my work cut out helping my best friend in her first day of motherhood.

Throwing all of the clothes that were hung from the banister beside the staircase into a laundry hamper, I began humming songs to myself. I had no idea what I was humming - it was just a melody that had been chasing through my mind since I left the hospital a few hours ago, but I liked it. As soon as I finished picking up all the clothes, I put them into the washing machine and switched it on. If only George could have seen me now, he’d have laughed so hard. I very rarely do housework, and if I do, it’s only bits and bobs - never this much. 

Just as I was about to turn on the vacuum cleaner to give the downstairs of their house a quick once over, my phone vibrated in my pocket. It was a text from Chloe. “Look how cute Joel looks!” the text read with a row of smiley faces, followed by a picture of Joel asleep in his incubator, pulling the same facial expression he had been pulling all morning - mouth slightly open and his eyes tightly shut. I grinned as I texted her back before putting my phone back into my pocket and switching the vacuum cleaner on. 

It was amazing how much of a big difference the vacuum cleaner had made. The carpet wasn’t exactly dirty beforehand; it was just in a good need of a freshening up from the vacuum cleaner. Putting the vacuum cleaner back in the cupboard beneath the staircase, I walked into the lounge and plumped up the cushions, rearranged the magazines on the coffee table so they were all straight and tidy and then put the few mugs that were dotted around the shelving units and window sills into the dish washer in the kitchen. 

“Not everybody knows how to work my body, knows how to make me want it, but, boy, you stay up on it,” I began to sing along to the radio once I switched it on, turning it up loud so I’d be able to hear it in other rooms apart from just the lounge. “You got that something that keeps me so off-balance. Baby, you’re a challenge. Let’s explore your talents.”

I finished sprucing the rest of the lounge up before heading back into the hallway and up the stairs. The rest of the other rooms were all clean and tidy - surprisingly - apart from the empty that I presumed was going to be used as the nursery. I certainly had a big job ahead of me as the room was completely bare - there was no paint on the walls, no furniture for baby Joel to sleep in, no teddies for baby Joel to cuddle up to, no clothes for Chloe to dress Joel up in, nothing. The only sign of it being anything relatively like a nursery was a bag from Mothercare that was dumped in the corner bursting full of baby clothes. It was so typical of Chloe. She was so unorganised. For the past three months I had been bugging her to start getting things for when the baby arrived, yet here we were - the baby had arrived and she still had nothing sorted.

Shaking my hips as I danced along to the radio that was playing throughout the house, I began making a list on my phone of what I needed to get. 

“A cot,” I paused as I sat down in the middle of the floor. “Fitted sheets. Sleeping bag. Blankets. Night light. Baby monitor. Baby bath. Baby bath thermometer. Changing mat.”