Thursday, April 17, 2008

Baby, that's expensive...

If I listen to the experts (and more particularly the marketing people) it is amazing I grew up without being unhappy, stupid or dead. Do not get the wrong idea. My family was an excellent group to grow up with and learn from. The issue is there wasn’t any of the stuff available then which is so intensely necessary to create happy, smart, and safe babies.
I slept in a crib which had gaps between the bars daring me to wedge my head through them and sustain an injury. My mother did not place musical speakers on her belly and play Mozart piano concertos to me prenatally thus increasing my intellectual powers exponentially. (I must be somewhat smart, because I use words like “exponentially” in a sentence, but I am not sure if the plural of concerto is “concertos” or “concerti”.) Many of the toys I played with were not academically designed but simply appealed to my imagination, gasp. I had wooden blocks (maybe even with lead paint) metal toy trucks and later in life an erector set with metal edges more efficient than a Ginsu knife.
Okay, I will admit moving away from choking hazards and other health and injury risks is a step in the right direction, but the baby product industry has gone well beyond that. I found a crib on Amazon.com which sells for $1,780. For that price is should not only double as a changing table, but it should actually change diapers. Speaking of changing tables, there was a very basic one made of teak for a mere $358. Considering that many baby experts (meaning experts about babies, not experts who are babies) say changing a diaper with the kid lying on the floor is the safest way to do it. Unless you are changing little Timmy at the top of a flight of stairs there is nowhere for him to fall if he is already on the floor.
Car seats are necessary. As a parent I always had my kids in car seats. Getting a car seat properly secured in the back of a two door Ford Escort requires Cirque du Soleil contortionist skills and the strength of a very unhappy Bruce Banner. (For those of you who grew up only reading educationally sound material, Bruce Banner is the mild mannered alter ego of the Hulk. See what you missed listening to Baby Einstein tapes and reading Charles Dickens for the Little Dickens.) A benefit is the occasional output of warm moisture spreads over the lining of the car seat rather than the pants of the parent. A drawback is the ability to soothe an annoyed baby tied like a teeny-Houdini into the car seat on a nine hour car ride to southeastern Missouri required listening to music tapes which would make Barney wish he was with his extinct brethren at the bottom of the La Brea Tar Pits.
My wife and I took our babies for an outing in one of those lightweight umbrella strollers. You know the ones with wheels stolen from old shopping carts meaning one goes hard left at all times. It folded up for easy storage in the hallway so you tripped over it nightly. Now there are strollers made by a company named Bugaboo which cost $900 and come in a range of colors including sand. Here is another stroller listed on Amazon: Peg Perego Uno Convertible Carriage to Stroller System in Moka. It sounds more like a complex order at Starbucks.
There is even a heading at Amazon for the “Green” baby. This does not mean a baby who has eaten way too many jars of Gerber’s green beans. (Actually, one of my children was so fond of Gerber sweet potatoes and carrots she turned a bit orange.) It is referring to a little baby Al Gore who wants to be a good steward of the environment. One “green” product is Seventh Generation Chlorine Free Diapers. I think the marketing guys need to head back to the drawing board. A diaper is definitely one thing which should not be handed down for seven generations.
Here is the final product I found which made me go, oy. There is a kit you can buy to check the alcohol level in breast milk. In a mere two minutes a new mommy can see if her night on the town alters her output from “Got Milk?” to “Always smooth never bitter”.

No comments: