"Tara, can you pass me the instructions?" Anna yelled from down the hall. I worked my way around the piles and piles of boxes. I passed her the booklet. Jayden was at the back of the room trying to figure out which piece goes where while Anna tried to help him by reading the instructions out loud.
"No, no. You have the wrong screwdriver!" she laughed. He picked up the right one from the selection of about twenty others and tried again. Anna left to get the other boxes from the hall. I followed after her and held the other side of the box.
"This one's the crib." We lowered it down to the ground in the empty room and stripped the tape off. It was cluttered full of timber pieces and details. We tried to put the crib together ourselves while Jayden worked on the chest of draws.
The empty room next to mine was slowly and steadily beginning to look more like a nursery then a cardboard jungle. "She's going to live here with you guys," Anna told us as she signed off the boxes of furniture earlier.
It took hours upon hours to build that crib. We were never really the furniture-building types but I think that it turned out looking exactly like it did on the box. All the furniture pieces were a light timber colour and in the corner hung a white bohemian macrame swing. The room is filled with enormous plants and terracotta pots. It looked like something taken straight off Pinterest.
"Lunch is ready!" Each of us left our tools right where they were and ran out into the kitchen where mum had prepared a warm pumpkin soup with sourdough garlic bread.
"I miss this soup! Mum, you need to make it more often," Anna took a spoonful of soup. Mum's pumpkin soup had a blend of butternut pumpkin, sweet potato and capsicum. The pumpkin is always picked from our gardens in fall. It used to annoy me when she made it while I was younger because the blending process made such a rowdy noise. We didn't hear that today. Too busy working away, I guessed.
Jayden finishes his soup before anyone else does and after that he's in the kitchen cleaning up after my mum. She protested but nothing could have stopped him; he was raised into an extremely respectful family.
"I'll be back in the nursery," he placed a kiss on Anna's forehead before leaving to finish the furniture. Anna and I sat at the bench across from mum. I tore a bit off my garlic bread into the soup.
Back upstairs, the nursery was almost finished. There was just one more thing to complete; the wooden rocking chair in the corner. Now, I think we all underestimated the rocking chair, because firstly, it came in about a thousand pieces. Were the furniture companies trying to make it unusable? Anna was the first one to attempt at it. "This looks perfectly doable," she spoke, in that calm yet enthusiastic voice she always uses. She pulled all of the bits out and laid them across the floor. No kidding, it almost covered the entire floor. She took two pieces and fitted them together. She gave us a see-it's-simple kind of look. Little did she know that it was the wrong two pieces.
"Anna, here, let me do it," Jayden took the pieces from her hand and undid the screws. Not as simple as he thought either, hey? Not even close.
I didn't even attempt this thing. Did you finish it? I can hear you wondering. Yes; the same rocking chair, assembled, is sitting still in the room next door to mine. Dad ended up putting it together when we were all away.
That afternoon, after several attempts of putting together the impossible chair, I woke up on the floor next to the newly-built crib. Anna woke in Jayden's arms on the ground.
