Nesting

My office is becoming my son's room.

There’s a term people use when you’re getting ready for a baby. They call it nesting. It’s supposed to describe this instinct that kicks in where you start preparing the house and organizing the closets and folding tiny clothes into drawers, getting everything ready for someone who doesn’t exist yet but is about to change everything. My wife Andrea and I are a couple months away from our second child, a boy, and I can tell you honestly that until last week I hadn’t nested at all.

I’ve been grinding. That’s the truth of it. Lettie, our daughter, is almost two, and the stretch since we found out about this pregnancy has been one of the most intense seasons of my life. New job, new team, building a community, writing here every week, learning to work alongside AI as it reshapes everything I do, trying to be a good dad and a good husband while also being someone who is building toward something bigger. I have been so locked into forward motion that the baby almost became an abstraction, this beautiful thing on the horizon that I acknowledged but hadn’t really let in. I was too busy becoming the person I wanted to be by the time he arrived to actually stop and feel the fact that he was coming.

Then the furniture started showing up. An armoire and a dresser, delivered to our Brooklyn apartment, carried into the small room right off our bedroom that used to be my office and is becoming the nursery. There’s a carpet in there now too. It’s not finished — more is coming — but something about watching Andrea start to build that room, watching it stop being the place where I worked and start becoming the place where our son will sleep, broke something open in me. I keep finding myself standing in the doorway just looking at it. Yesterday it was the room where I wrote these posts and took my calls and ground through late nights, and today it’s becoming someone’s first home, and you can feel it changing even though it’s just wood and carpet and paint. The whole thing is happening right next to where we sleep, not down some hallway but right there, and there’s something about that closeness that makes it impossible to keep the baby abstract anymore.

Lettie knows something is happening in that room. She doesn’t fully understand what’s coming, not really, but she runs to the door and tells us to open it and says “baby brother room” and then rolls around on the carpet like it’s the most exciting place in the apartment. She does this constantly. She just wants to be in there. Watching her claim that space, watching her roll around on the floor of a room that belongs to someone she hasn’t met yet, is the thing that finally made it real for me. I could suddenly see it. Not the idea of two kids but the actual picture: Lettie in there with her brother, the two of them in that little room next to ours, a family that’s bigger than the one I have right now. Something about watching Lettie in that room unlocked a feeling I hadn’t let myself have yet. Not the engineered readiness I’d been chasing for months. The kind where your heart is open and you’re not afraid of what’s next.

I spent so long in laser focus, grinding to set my family up financially, trying to make sure we’d be taken care of, that I hadn’t given myself the space to just be excited. I was happy, but I wasn’t ready. The nesting wasn’t the furniture. The nesting was the moment I finally looked up from everything I was building and let myself feel how full my life already is.

I’m going to be a dad of two. Lettie is going to have a brother. It’s going to be a ton of work and not enough sleep and more chaos than I can probably imagine right now, but I’m not thinking about any of that. I’m thinking about my daughter rolling around on a carpet in a room that’s almost ready, saying “baby brother room” to no one and everyone, and how lucky I am that this is my life. I’ve been writing here for almost a year about ambition and building and showing up, and all of that still matters to me. But right now, in this season, the most important thing I’m building is a family. Everything else is just furniture.