gold99 Some Expectant Parents Don’t Want Gifts. But Can You Do the Laundry?

Updated:2025-01-06 04:15    Views:133

When Colette Louis was pregnant with her second child, she knew she wanted a nesting party.

Similar to baby showers, nesting parties bring friends together to celebrate an expectant parent with community and food. Missing, however, are the gifts (and the accompanying awkward gift-opening) and groan-inducing games. Instead, guests chip in with various tasks around the house. The parties often take place during the third trimester when parents start to feel especially overwhelmed.

Ms. Louis, a 39-year-old content creator in Charlotte, N.C., gathered friends for the party in March 2023 — when she was seven months pregnant — and assigned them various chores. One friend cleaned breast pump parts while another washed and folded clothes. In exchange, Ms. Louis prepared a brunch spread.

“At that point, I had everything that I needed,” for her son, who was born that May, Ms. Louis said. Having her friends help her and her husband get everything ready took “a weight off.”

Was it hard for Ms. Louis to put her friends to work? “Not at all,” she said. When she had her daughter six years earlier, she didn’t ask for help. “I thought, as a mom, you’re supposed to be able to take care of your baby by yourself,” she said. “I quickly learned that actually, no, you need a village.”

ImageColette Louis hosted a nesting party in 2023, when she was pregnant with her second child.Credit...Allison Claire ImageryImage“I had everything that I needed,” she said, but knew parenthood still required a village.Credit...via Colette Louis

Nesting parties hark back to the community-driven events of yore like barn raising — historically Amish community gatherings that combined building a neighbor’s barn and socializing — and have cozy, hygge vibes. They are popular on social media — on TikTok, videos of nesting parties can get millions of views.

Campos-Pons, in blue, speaks to the “angels” before the beginning of the march at Harlem Art Park on 120th Street.Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York TimesImageThe procession stopped at multiple sites in Harlem and featured poetry readings, a musical performance and speeches about the history of the area especially its ties to Black, Cuban and Afro-Cuban life.Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times

In her welcoming remarks, Campos-Pons told the crowd that, rather than a protest, “this is a walk of love, a walk for hope, a walk for the future, a walk for people who precede us and for people who are not yet here.” Billed as a “Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity,” the event spans two mornings in September. Last Saturday’s route started at the Harlem Art Park, a cobblestone site on East 120th Street in the heart of a neighborhood home to African Americans and people from Puerto Rican, Mexican, Caribbean, and African diasporas. The second procession is on Sept. 20 and will begin in Central Park and end in Madison Square Park, in the wealthy Flatiron district.

Icom said in a statement Thursday that it had not shipped any of the IC-V82 radios from its plant in Wakayama, Japan, in roughly a decade. But the company has long warned of what it called a surge in counterfeit IC-V82 transceivers.

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