butterflylike network

One unexpected side effect of the flooding in our basement was that our dog nearly killed himself. We learned out that emergency care facilities try to charge you for the air your pet breathes while he’s there. But what’s worse, he was in really bad shape, and being as we are sentimental fools, we consider him to be something like our first child. He seems to have eaten some construction material while no one was looking, which twisted up his insides completely, there was diarrhea, vomiting, blood, all kinds of scary and disgusting, and wound up having to be on intravenous fluids and nourishment for two days. He’s lost a lot of weight, not being able to eat at all for several days. But as is the nature of small animals, just a few days afterwards he’s acting like nothing ever happened. He’s never been sick for a day in his life so I suppose from his point of view, it’s all been so far out of the ordinary that it’s not worth remembering.

It turns out we are sentimental and probably unpractical fools in other ways too: we finally broke down and made our first real baby purchase. It’s a baby carriage-like stroller. We went against the sage advice of all baby-store proprietors and ordered a Bumbleride Queen B with bassinet because it’s adorable, it’s like a classic baby carriage, though it’s on the heavy and big side and I’ve no idea what it’ll be like to use it. It turns out there’s a free bassinet deal for the blue one on strollers.com (carriage chassis+bassinet+regular seat for later+free shipping), which makes this “pram” actually not overpriced.

A part of me can’t believe how much time I’m spending putting together lists of items we might need for the baby, based on what other people say, that is. Because of course we’ve no experience of our own in this area, at least not any experience from within the last 20-ish years. Which is a whole different ballgame. For some reason the stroller and crib have loomed largest in all this. I have to admit a part of the reason for this is just vanity: I figure a stroller is a pretty public thing, and I tend to be vain about my clothes & hair too so I want the stroller to be a cute one.

But here’s my whole thought process - and feel free to laugh at JUST HOW MUCH thought I’ve put into this:

1. I wanted something that didn’t make me cringe when I looked at it. I find umbrella strollers depressing, no matter how practical they might be. They’re too much about the beige-and-pastel world of the baby and childcare industry, with all its wasteful and badly designed plastics. So by extension they’re too much focused on the child’s perspective, and I think that’s backwards: the children are the ones coming into our adult world and not vice versa. So I want, as far as possible, to surround my child with things that teach them an aesthetic sensibility and aren’t only functional. I think that’s important - I want her to live in a world that isn’t ugly. Plus, I figure walking will be my primary form of exercise for some time, and I need to have things to bolster my desire to walk. Such as a really adorable stroller.

2. I have such fond memories of pushing my little sister about in a pram. She had a real, old-world, cute pram way back when, and since she’s 8 years younger than me, my mom let me take her out for walks by myself - in early 1980s Hungary, in Szeged. A different world, admittedly, than the one we live in today. Still, I think it’s time to recapture some of the sense of trust in our surroundings that we used to have then. So there: I’ve been hankering after a pram with all my heart. I’m also hankering after a high chair made of wood that doesn’t have it’s own tray, like the Tripp Trapp from Stokke. My little sister had something like that too - a family hand-me-down wooden high-chair from Communist 70s Hungary, which I’d rather love to have if it still existed, despite how unsafe it probably is by today’s standards. A lot of kids safely grew up using it so… well I can’t help but take today’s safety regulations with a grain of salt. And I have fond memories of feeding her as she sat at the table in her high chair…

3. I read tons and tons of reviews of strollers, and read through the Baby Bargains book too - and Bumblerides are considered good. Not as practical or cheap as Maclarens or Gracos, of course. But Bumblerides aren’t beige! or pastel! which matters to me. And I read consumer reviews. And I talked to baby shop proprietors. And then I ignored their advice.

4. The blue one I ordered, with the free bassinet, is a good deal. The bassinet can (according to several reviewers) be used as a sleep bassinet when the baby’s really small, which is something we were thinking to have anyway. (Those things are damned expensive, by the way! So as an effort to return to reason - the crib: it is coming from Ikea. Of all the ones that look nice, theirs is cheapest. The more expensive cribs don’t look to me to be a whole lot better, and the Ikea crib is considered plenty safe by most reviewers. Now if only they weren’t constantly out of stock…) I suppose the deal I got applied only to the blue stroller because it’s the color that doesn’t sell so well. I vaguely wonder if people will assume baby’s a boy (which she isn’t) but I rather suspect she will have a ton of pink and red things, and deep marine blue just seems like a good color for a stroller anyway. Because: it is not pastel! or beige!

5. Obviously, a certain spirit in an object is more important to me than strict practicality: I drive a new Beetle. It’s getting on in age (I bought it years ago from a professor who got it when it first came out, and had it for several years without using it hardly at all) but I rather hope it’ll hold up for a while. There’s just something to be said for a car that makes you smile every time you look at it. I want things for my child that will do the same.

Sometimes I feel like laughing at myself for getting so serious about these things. But somehow, they matter: it’s about introducing a new person to our world, and going about it in a way that feels right to us. And I think that should include the objects we’ll surround her with, in addition to how we behave with her.

In other (and apparently less important) news: I’m working on a book proposal for general audiences, based on my dissertation. Someone I respect very much has graciously offered to review it and give me feedback on it so I’ve a bit less than two weeks to finish it. Which is good: more time would mean I’d over-mystify it and end up with writing that reads like a dog chasing his tail. Never give yourself more time than absolutely necessary to complete such things.

• I am 30 weeks along today. If the Girl Bean were born seven weeks from today, she’d be full term. Scary. But exciting.
• My weight gain overall is pretty good (i.e. not too little and not too much) but very erratic: during one of the 4-week periods between checkups I gained 10 pounds after hardly gaining anything before, then for weeks afterwards, and over the last two weeks I gained 4 pounds (once again after hardly gaining any weight during the preceding 2 weeks). I didn’t notice eating very differently though I do occasionally feel a kind of desperate hunger that I’m not used to. My doctor said not to worry since overall, my weight is good, and my lab results and blood pressure are fine too. But to be on the safe side I’m trying to be more conscious of what I eat. And I may break down and finally buy a bathroom scale, which is something I have never owned before.
• Round ligament pain: it comes and goes. Problem is that the Girl Bean is lying horizontally across my midsection and has a tendency to rest her legs on a round ligament in my right abdomen. Which is really painful. I can’t walk much, which is a shame because where we now live is a great place for long-long walks. I guess I’ll just wait for Girl Bean to come out and be carrier-portable or strollerable.
• Suppressed immune system: yes (and by the way, I’m amazed at how many of the bloggers I’ve been following off and on throughout the years are pregnant or just had a baby. Too many to make a quick list.). I had the worst cold of my whole life this winter. I thought I wouldn’t survive it. Because of course another side effect of pregnancy is increased blood flow to your mucous membranes, including the inside of your nose. So for those of us who have a stuffy nose as of the third month of pregnancy, a cold is just ten times as bad as usual.
• The baby moving: awesome. All of the above doesn’t matter so much because she does. A lot. Sometimes it’s a little strange, like when she stomps her foot at the tender area that used to be my belly button. And I love how taken her father is with these signs of her existence.
• Not being able to bend down without huffing and puffing and contorting myself in strange ways to pick stuff up: I try to milk that as much as possible.
• Not being able to get out of bed in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom (I need to, pretty regularly) without huffing and puffing and using my arms in all kinds of strange ways: noisy. Although… since my bed-mate is partially responsible for my condition, I’m also not as careful as I could be.
• Attention from people just because I have a big belly: love it.

I meant to post this last week, but fate, or rather nature, intervened. The house we just moved into was in the path of one of the worst bits of wind from this weekend’s storm in New Jersey. A large number of not-so-small trees fell down and cut power lines all over our town, several of them in our street. We had no power from Saturday evening to late Monday night. This we could have endured - after all, one of the perks of living in a town as opposed to a city is that one can easily have a fireplace. Which we huddled around and kept a fire in pretty much nonstop. That part would almost have been fun, like going camping except without having to actually go anywhere.

The problem was that without electricity, the sump pump that keeps our downstairs dry stopped (go figure: it needs something to power it), so there was water all over the entire basement, which contains two rooms of the house, and what’s worse: the furnace. Not that that’s abnormal. But the water covered the part of the furnace that contains its control board (which is electric), which was fried, and without which the furnace can’t function, even after some electricity supply has been found.

I could go on and on about how stupidly I think these furnaces are constructed to have the control board so close to the ground. There were more than four inches of water this time but it would have taken a lot less to ruin the the control board. Which had to be ordered and so our furnace was not repaired until yesterday. Three days without heat may not sound like much but oh. my. lord. was it cold. We also had to get a generator to power the pump to get the water level to not rise in the basement. You can imagine what water had already done at that point to the carpet and some of the walls. We got off lucky: our personal stuff was not on the floor so aside from the bottom of some of the furniture downstairs, nothing of ours was really damaged, or at least nothing of real value. I guess it shows that I’ve lived around here long enough to know that you just don’t leave anything of value on the floor in a New Jersey basement.

Generators are serious business: one has to get up in the middle of the night and put gas into them so that the pump won’t stop working, which would then result in more destruction. Our landlord (or more precisely, his insurance company) foots the bill for repairs but even so, what a waste: all of the carpets downstairs were ripped out and parts of the walls. It’s all going to have to be replaced. What mystifies me, however, is this: there is some minimal backup for the sump pump, but nothing that would hold up in the kinds of storms this area regularly gets. As in: every other year or so. Why do people not have more serious flood management systems? Even with insurance this amount of flooding gets expensive… after all: there’s always a deductible.

But now to the original topic of this post, which I meant to write last week, before all this storm-and-flood-related digression.

There’s a pretty funny video of a Durex ad at Bitch Ph.D., involving a cucumber and a visit by one’s parents. As ads go, it’s very well done: it shocks and causes laughter - or outrage - but gets your attention. At Bitch Ph.D., it’s the occasion for another round of debate in the comment thread about whether Europeans or Americans are more sexist. I’m a European living in America and this probably colors my views - although perhaps I just have a different basis for comparison than someone who is consistently immersed in one or the other culture. Continue Reading »