My Very Productive Day

I spent the day with my mother. Ostensibly we got together to buy a baby gift for my yet-to-be-born niece (Gracie to you), whose shower is next weekend, but once I had introduced my mother to the wonders of the online registry, we cut the time down from an all-day trip to Atlanta to about an hour of surfing, wherein my mom found the "travel system" she wanted and marked it for gift wrap and delivery to the hostess, and it was all done without our ever getting off our collective duffs.

(I had already gotten my present for Gracie -- Complete sets of [classic] Winnie-the-Pooh, [classic] Curious George, Frances, and Madeleine, with a few Boynton books thrown in for extra -- and so I was able to sit by and feel smug and virtuous while walking Mom through the obstacle course of online shopping, but she is now two steps ahead of me, thus cancelling out the smug-and-virtuous, which serves me right, of course.)

I have something important to say about the evolution of baby gear: holy shit, dude. I mean, I realize it's been fifteen long years since my nannyhood, but this stuff is light-years ahead of those dark days when not only was everything a separate piece of equipment, but you couldn't leave the house without at least three trips to the car before you ever even thought of strapping in the baby and yourself for the ride. The thing my mother bought is a miracle of modern engineering -- carriage, stroller, and car seat in one -- and are the days far ahead when you can expect to buy an object the size of a box of raisins that does everything but detect the degree of severity of your baby's diaper rash? I think that those days cannot be. Far ahead, I mean.

Ergonomic papasan hammock-swings. Video baby monitoring systems as sophisticated as any FBI surveillance equipment. Intelligent cribs that know when your baby is hot or cold and adjust temps accordingly and look more like reptile-cages at the zoo than a sleeping space for delicate baby humans. Playpens that double as changing tables and fold out into invisibly-fenced playmats that subliminally teach your child the alphabet, thereby ensuring reading before walking. Okay, I made that last one up, but probably the only reason it doesn't exist is that no one's thought of it yet.

It's astonishing. And it makes me more nervous about the idea of becoming a mother than ever, and that's why I thank goodness that my sister-in-law C. is ready to do all the hard work, so that instead of worrying about screwing up a child beyond recognition (or, now, frying her in her own bed), I can buy cool books and cool toys and draw story-pictures of lizards going to work guided by sky princesses in raindrop dresses, and any screwing up that's done won't, with any luck, be done by me.

Man, oh man, my brother and sister-in-law are brave. But they will have some amazing stuff, and also a baby, and I guess these things will make up for the lifetime of work they have ahead of them.

:::

Okay, so instead of driving to the Pottery Barn Kids store in Atlanta, we ended up having a free playday, which we spent in the following ways:

• Having quasi-NY-style pizza at a new restaurant in town


• furnishing fantasy houses with the silliest furniture we could find in this one store near the restaurant


• buying the best, most on-clearance, most ridiculous retro upholstery fabric to recover the seat of my desk chair, which has been needing recovering pretty much since I bought it about ten years ago (this fabric, it looks like a fifties-era formal living room exploded!)


• seeing motherfucking Snakes on a motherfucking Plane, which now holds the dubious honor of being the only movie ever to make me hyperventilate -- in fact, as far as I know, the only thing ever to make me hyperventilate -- and which I will never, ever see ever again, but which was heart-stoppingly awesome

It was a pretty good day, actually.