The past few weeks have not been peaceful ones in our household. The baby has been demanding all of our energy, day and night. Our sleep is intermittent and fitful, riddled with nightmare visions of basic necessities yet unpurchased. Weekends, once respites to be relished, are now marches to be endured: to Buy Buy Baby in Rockville, to Babies 'R' Us and Target in Silver Spring, in pursuit of stuff, more stuff, stuff we absolutely, positively must have to keep our baby safe and stylish and comfortable and clean and content.
Things are bound to get worse once the baby is born.
Like many parents-to-be, my wife and I are spending our last few babyless weeks in a panic-purchase feedback loop. Anxiety and uncertainty fuel impulsive trips to baby-goods superstores, whose gargantuan inventories only beget more anxiety and uncertainty, to which we -- good American consumers that we are -- respond by filling an oversize shopping cart until it's difficult to steer. ("Honey, do we need one of these vibrating Pack 'N Play play yards in Ivy League print with optional canopy accessory? Are you sure? The mother on the package seems awfully happy that she has one . . . .")
So far we have managed to avoid splurging on some of the more egregious examples of baby bling: the Bugaboo Frog -- at $729, the current "it" stroller among brand-conscious urban sophisticates; the wool-and-cashmere baby blanket (with matching plush horse toy) from Hermes, which will set you back $1,040; or the extravagant kid-scaled furnishings to be found at PoshTots.com, where the guardians of today's Little Lord Fauntleroys can find that $8,900 handmade bombe vanity the nursery is practically crying out for.
There will always be those who don't mind using their children to broadcast their wealth, but for the most part, America's $6 billion-a-year baby gear industry thrives on two seemingly incompatible mindsets that tend to coexist in new parents: terror and schmaltz.
On the one hand, the industry would have us believe that the material world is wholly inhospitable to children -- a place where all table edges are too sharp, all tap water too hot, every strap and string a potential noose. On the other hand, they proffer a pastel petting zoo of a world, embroidered with ducklings and lambykins, where all is eternally soft and sweet and cuteness the only currency.
One trip to a local baby-goods superstore reveals the strange sight of first-time parents zigzagging frenetically between these two poles: cooing at kittycat-emblazoned booties one moment, stressing out over carbon monoxide detectors the next. The pressure to give in and buy one of everything -- from a talking car seat to a "Kick 'N Play" piano that a newborn can play with its feet -- can be intense.
For some it can be immobilizing.
"I didn't have anything until about six months into my pregnancy," says Traci Zambotti, 36, of Glover Park. "My old college roommate called me and said, 'What have you got?' And I said: 'Nothing.' So she immediately came down to visit and took me to my first baby store."
When they arrived at Babies 'R' Us in Silver Spring, Zambotti found the experience of entering its 37,000-square-foot space "overwhelming," she says. "I was paralyzed. I just stood there in the front of the store. We decided we had to go get lunch before we could even go in. We didn't even buy anything that day."
I met Zambotti and her 9-month-old son, Joey, at Wonderland, a neighborhood bar in Columbia Heights that hosts a "Baby Happy Hour" every Wednesday evening. For two or three hours midweek, moms and dads get together on the bar's second floor to commune and commiserate, their babies sitting on their laps or crawling/toddling nearby.
Mara Mlyn, 39, of Columbia Heights, bounces 9 1/2 -month-old Ezra on her knee as she recalls the guilt she felt at not having a fully decked-out nursery ready and waiting when he arrived home from the hospital. In the middle of an 11th-hour renovation, Mlyn and her husband had moved kitchen supplies into what would become Ezra's room. In the place of mobiles and bassinets were microwaves and blenders.
