At night, this pile of baby goodies will multiply.
We are currently being inundated with boxes. I am on a first name basis with the UPS delivery guy, who hates me because he always delivers on Tuesdays and I’m never home on Tuesdays. The Postal Service has so many boxes for us, they instituted a special Sunday truck delivery to handle the amount of boxes we were getting. That’s right, the Post Office had so many packages, the dude actually came to deliver on his day off. Today IKEA delivered the Swedish pinnacle in wardrobe engineering in twelve boxes.
We are scoring because I’m married to a beautiful, intelligent, warm and caring woman who has lots of friends. And I have a lot of friends, despite being kinda grumpy (“snarky” in the language or our household.) So Terry and I are overwhelmed with the expression of love from our family and friends. We love them right back! It’s so exciting! People are so interesting!!
Some of the clothes waiting for Ronan. Note the preponderance of tops.
Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, our house is being taken over by aliens. The aliens are coming in boxes, and I’m not always sure of their intentions. For instance, we are top-heavy (as in baby T-shirts and upper body coverings, not what you’re thinking.) We suddenly realized that Ronan had very few leg coverings. We’re not sure how that happened, but the kid has a month of shirts and two days of pants. “He’s going to be cold.” Terry sagely observed. So we got more leggings and booties and pants.
There is a giant, bright red ottoman in the other room. It is designed to put stuff in it. It’s from IKEA so Terry used her degree in Swedish furniture engineering to put it together. Now, in the Ikea store, this made a lot of sense, because the unit looked like an ottoman. However, when we assembled it in the back office, it clearly was the size of a small raft, perhaps we could use it as a crib if we could find small rails and bolt them to the side. It’s gorgeous, which is great, but at the IKEA store with its wide open spaces crowded with weekend shoppers, it looked normal size, but in the delivery truck the thing grew huge with its weird alien/Swedish hybrid powers. I fully expect that it will grow to the size of the entire room overnight.
The IKEA Pax wardrobe waiting for assembly.
Like all the other parents who are concerned about the environment, we are facing the dilemma of what to do with our baby’s shit. For our baby care instructor (same person as the birthing class) pampers are just fine, because hospitals use them. However, we are trying to think of ways to not deposit plastic diapers in landfills. There’s the cloth camp, which favors cloth diapers that you wash, and the disposable camp, which throws the diapers out. There’s a new movement from the attachment parenting crowd that listens to the baby for the key sounds of pooping and peeing, and takes the kid to the toilet when they start to make those sounds. Apparently much like a cat, you can train a baby to poop when they are over the toilet. I am so thrilled about this method because it involves not having anything on the baby to catch the poop, and I am so confident in my parenting skill that leaving the diapers off doesn’t intimidate me at all. (I am totally lying; I can’t handle this right now. I would totally freak out watching the baby for any sign of imminent poop-dom.) We have elected the wussy way out of the poop conundrum; we have elected to use chlorine-free diapers to start with, and then possibly disposable inserts. If you don’t know, babies poop 8-12 times a day, so we’re looking at a box of diapers every other day. Fun!
Enter the diaper genie. This device seals the diapers in plastic, which doesn’t help the environment, except in our home, which will have 8-12 soiled diapers per day. It’s probably going to get smelly. So perhaps that will improve the environment in our home. It’s so hard to know what we’re able to do and what would be the right thing to do. I do know from personal experience that babies can appear to poop out their entire body weight in one diaper, which is pretty amazing. And totally horrifying.
But we will suffocate long before the poop overtakes us, because of the alien boxes that seem to multiply in the dark of the night.