Last week I opened the
door, once again, to the delivery man. This time it was the crib.
“Hello, I see you’re
stocking up,” the delivery man said. I took a closer look – it was the same one
that had delivered the stroller (in two massive, partially squashed boxes)
three days earlier.
“It’s a bottomless
well,” he informed me conspiratorially, “and that’s without even getting
started on the diapers!”
Piotrek and I have never
been in any doubt about the massive invasion of Stuff that is imminently upon
us. We (yes, both of us, not just me) have made list after list of Things We
Might Need, Things the Internet Says We Need, Things Friends Have Needed and
Things We Saw Online That Are Sure to Be Necessary. We have found ourselves, on
many a late weekend afternoon, wandering numbly through the overcrowded aisles
of one of the hypermarkets, gazing at rows of baby gear, picking things up and
putting them down, and eventually leaving, bewildered, with our shopping bag full
of ice cream, French cheese and garden tools.
Recently I found myself,
with the help of an experienced friend, trapped in a wholesale baby gear
supplier’s between closely-parked prams and towers of packaged pastel bedding. While
I hovered along the edges of the daunting shelves, giving an inquisitive poke
to various sausage-shaped objects in glaring shades of pink, my friend
test-bounced the more accessible of the closely-parked prams with an
appreciative sigh at their super-sized wheels, and her one-year-old son bravely
grasped each buckwheat-filled baby mattress one by one and thrust it to the
ground.
I had not, of course,
come unarmed; I was clutching, defensively, not one but three print-outs, from
different sources, of “baby essentials”. Each list was at least two pages long,
and contained carefully itemized toiletries, textiles and clothing of every
imaginable shape and purpose.
It would of course have
been more helpful if the lists had bothered to describe either the shape or the
purpose of any of the mysteriously-named objects. What exactly is the difference between “pajacyki”,
“kaftaniki”, and “śpioszki”? (“Bodies” I’m OK on. I’ve got those. Quite a lot,
actually.) What is the potential physical/psychological damage inflicted on the
child who leaves the hospital without one of these fashion items in his/her
travelling bag? (A travelling bag stylishly clipped to the handle of a 3-in-one
travel system on super-sized wheels.) And how many of them do you put on at
once? Do they have to match? How many different kinds of sheets do you need?
Why are there fluffy pastel lambs on everything?
A painful truth every
new parent must be reconciled with is that babies – as we are led to believe by
the market in baby goods – absolutely must be surrounded by stomach-turning
combinations of candy colours, twisted into ghoulishly grinning animals,
inexplicably spattered with busy minutiae such as bumblebees or stars, and more
inexplicably still, printed in random places with random English words in
incoherent half-sentences highlighting sentiments such as “friend”, “sweet”,
“little”.
Does a baby feel safer
in its crib, rolling back and forth over a sea of sheep grins in colours
reminiscent of absolutely nothing in its surrounding world? Does it gaze at the
comforting invocations of friendship and camaraderie that buffer its sweet
little world and feel it has a verified, validated place? Or are the fluffy
candyfloss miasmas for the benefit of the adult, who in their presence feels
appropriately fluffy, warm, sweet and gooey?
Standing in front of a
shelf of nursing pillows, enthusiastically urged by my friend to choose “the
one I like best”, I felt not warmth and fluffiness, but a sort of queasy self-consciousness,
as though I were being urged to select a smelly medication for an embarrassing
disease I would rather not admit to having. I felt, somehow, idiotic picking up
and contemplating a very unsystematic smattering of yellow stripes, brown
giraffes, teddies in red t-shirts and distressingly polka-dotted butterflies on
a background of intense sky-blue.
My friend remained
unfazed, as though the abominations in fabric printing were entirely normal,
and handed me a blob of bubble-gum pink, where generously-petalled pink flowers
competed for space with toothy bunnies. “How about this for a girl?” she
suggested. My inner cringe held me back from examining it too closely.
“I think I’d prefer
something without… patterns,” I said meekly, scouring the shelves in
desperation for a solid-coloured pillow that might have been pushed far back
into some upper corner. I was handed something in a pastel shade of apple
green, besmeared with only a faint spattering of stars and comets. “Green isn’t
really my colour,” I said more meekly still, and grasped desperately at a
package which seemed to promise a more eye-soothing combination of polka-dots
and red stripes. “This one will do,” I said with forced confidence, before
noticing that the polka-dots were only the prelude to a playground of
butterflies, bumblebees and flowers rocketing through clouds.
At the end of nearly two
hours of circling and searching, during which I became increasingly numb and
passive, an expensive stack of pastel objects formed on the countertop, for
which I found myself, in disbelief, counting out from a stack of 100-złoty
bills.
Our daughter is now
equipped with a foam-backed swaddle (in a blue-and-white chequered pattern, as
a nod to my mild pink intolerance), two hooded towels, a set of rubber-backed
and non-rubber backed sheets (in solids of glaring bubble-gum, glaring periwinkle,
and white), a stack of flannel cloths covered in giraffes, teddy bears and
grinning lambs (there were no other possibilities), and one outfit in newborn
size with the least-offending of the proffered designs, roughly-sketched blue
puppies. And the nursing pillow, with its fields of rocketing butterflies on a
crash-course into orange-and-green polka-dots and red stripes.
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| Can you spot the difference between the bodies, pajacyki, kaftaniki and śpioszki? |
I had opened the door,
once again, to the courier earlier that day. “Hello again – I believe I’m
picking something up this time?”
“Yes indeed,” I told
him, and pointed to the two squashed, now re-duct-taped boxes containing the
Disappointing Stroller that was being sent back.
“Something I delivered?”
“More than likely,” I
concurred.
He wiggled the awkward
things out the door, and the Quest for the Stroller continued.
It has been many months
now since Piotrek began scouring the internet, the consumer reports, the
second-hand shops and the price comparison websites for the Perfect Vehicle. This
is no easy task. (Learning the lingo of the stroller, for one, took me several
long investigations. I have now become accustomed to pricking up my ears at
phrases like “hand brake”, “sprung frame”, “pumped wheels”, “adjustable
headrest”, “flip-over handle”.)
I read, more and more
intensively, online reviews in which experienced stroller-users, mostly of the
vehemently disappointed variety, moaned about the trials and sufferings of
buying a stroller with too heavy a frame, or too slanted a seat, or too
complicated a system of clips and buttons.
Now, for all our
reading, and looking at pictures, and comparing reviews, the truth is we had
only really seen one stroller. Piotrek, on more than one occasion, had
test-driven our friends’ daughter in her Graco Symbio, and pronounced it “very
good indeed”. And while we always intended to visit one of those stroller
wholesale megastores to test drive All the Models before making a decision,
there were always better, more pressing things to do. And that is how Piotrek
began a cycle of compulsive bidding on second-hand online auctions for various
Symbios, resulting in the somewhat spontaneous purchase, through a second-hand
stroller company, of a grey one that was delivered in those two massive,
partially-squashed boxes by the conspiratorial courier.
After a brief period of
congratulating ourselves on having finally come to a decision (not easy for
either of us), on having cheated the system and bought a high-class model for
about a third of the price, and on the very comfortable and elegant design of
this object we would now forevermore be attached to whenever we left the house,
the disappointment set in. The thing was far more used than it had appeared in
the pictures. The straps were so ratty they were almost unusable. The cushions
were dirty and faded, and the framework was slightly sagging. And the carrycot
attachment – what a disgrace! It turned out there was no separate carrycot at
all, just a wobbly cushioned insert, with a dented cardboard frame and missing
snaps, that was meant to sit snugly in the flattened seat of the stroller, but
rather perched on it precariously, threatening to toss the baby out at the
smallest bump.
As is logical when one
feels oneself cheated, we immediately took ourselves to the baby megastore to
check what we may have missed out on by choosing too quickly. We were
confronted by row upon row of dwarfing, massively-built vehicles that looked
roomy and sturdy enough to swallow me whole, never mind a baby.
“Do you have any
specific questions about any of the models?” asked a very young, beany, spotty
man who did not look like he was nearly old enough to have real-life experience
of a stroller.
Do we have any specific
questions? Yes, indeed: What, specifically is the difference between any of
these monster trucks, and which specific model does one really need?
I think I muttered
something about it being “light”, while Piotrek threw in a few
knowledgeable-sounding phrases about springs, clip attachments and the weight
of the carrycot. (It turns out all carrycots have a standard size and weight.
Obviously.)
“Well, you’ll want it to
be sturdy,” the beany young man said, bouncing, as illustration, a huge
cream-coloured boat mounted on wheels the size of pumpkins. We nodded in eager
agreement – of course, of course we wanted it to be sturdy, of course we had
thought first and foremost of the comfort of our daughter. “Sturdy… and light,”
I interjected hopefully.
They all have names like
“explorer”, “roamer”, “move”, “pulse”. “What’s the name of that second one we
looked at?” I asked Piotrek later, as I searched for used models of our
successful finds online. “The lightweight grape purple pumped-wheel
adjustable-handle with the one-click fold system. Mutsy Explorer? Mutsy
Adventurer?”
“Mutsy Conquistador, I
think,” he decided.
There had only been two
strollers, in the entire megastore, light enough for me to handle, narrow
enough to manoeuvre between, say, the standard aisles of a supermarket, and
sturdy enough to survive the trials of Polish sidewalks. One, the X-Lander
X-Pulse, turned out to be a new model, too new to be available used. (All the
other models were far too heavy and clunky. I tested them.) The other was this
Mutsy Contraption, apparently at the upper end of baby travel design and not to
be found gathering dust in the basements of mere mortals. So the search came to
a standstill once again.
Which
is why, really, I found myself with my friend and her son in the pastel
nightmare of the baby wholesaler’s, wedged between stroller frames. She had had
the novel suggestion of foregoing the mainstream international baby design
industry for the cheaper, simpler Polish manufacturers. “You know,” she said,
“Polish models – Polish conditions.” And she was right. These smaller, lighter,
simpler models were clearly made to be lifted in and out of trams, and ride
smoothly over sidewalks full of holes. It took me seconds to locate three or
four very promising ones. (I was aided in reducing this to two by a very
helpful shop assistant, who marched between them barking, “Not this one – it’s
rubbish. It’s heavier than it looks and the wheels don’t turn properly. Not
that one either – no one would buy that one. Anyway, there’s no carrycot.”)
By
the time Piotrek joined us, I had pushed, bounced, clipped, unclipped and
weighed my two favourites over and over, finally settling on one that was
light, elegant and manoeuvrable. With one small drawback – it only came in rose
pink.
“But
didn’t you say it would be a girl?” the shop assistant asked with some
confusion. “This is nice, for a girl.” I pointed out to her the very real
danger of my husband’s diminishing sense of masculinity should he be condemned
to push a rose-pink pram around for the next three years. She nodded
thoughtfully. “Is there another colour?” I asked. “Black, maybe? Or blue?”
It
turned out that what they had on the shop floor was pretty much it. “There is,
of course, a similar model, that one next to you, in blue,” the shop assistant
suggested. I found myself to be standing on top of a slim electric-blue pram
with sturdy but modestly-sized wheels, that bounced and turned as deftly as the
others. “There is also one other colour,” the she added, and pointed to the
shelf up in the corner of the room.
And
there it stood – our red rocket, svelt, comfy, sporty, stylish, beaming with an
aura that said, I am the fastest and the smoothest ride in town. The Bebetto
Nico. (“Of course, you pay for what you get,” the shop assistant barked
helpfully. “This one’s cheaper than the other – it doesn’t have the seat
insert, or the cup holder. But really, they’re all the same, aren’t they, I
wouldn’t bother with half the stuff they throw in. But those manufacturers have
to come up with something new every
year…”)
So
we are now the proud owners of a shiny red pram, with clip-on red toddler seat
and a sleek black clip-on car seat, each with a generous hood that can be
extended to engulf the child entirely in a protective red cocoon. It’s standing
in the kitchen, with the carrycot attached and the headrest up, and I go and
give it a little bounce every now and then, on its shapely, well-sprung wheels.
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| Our Red Rocket |
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| The Stroller Cocoon |
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| The swanky carseat and strappy bag |
