crib
Because who knows how much time I’ll have to prepare when I return home, I spent a lot of time this week getting ready for the baby. I washed a bunch of baby clothes in baby detergent. I bought a crib, a mattress, and a co-sleeper off of Craigslist. I folded lots of cloth diapers. Our washer and dryer were running nonstop for several days.
I’ve seen a lot of pictures on facebook of pregnant friends getting the baby room ready. It’s the husband who’s assembling the furniture in all those pictures. Which is wonderful, and Steve does a whole lot in our house, notably the garden (oh, and he’s the one who has the job that pays real money, not invisible blog money). But I for some reason am always the furniture assembler. I assembled our entire Ikea kitchen, like 20 sets of cabinets and doors and hinges and shelves. And I was going to assemble the crib.
I picked the crib up from a friendly woman who lived far away in the middle of nowhere, hauled it into my car with her help, then hauled it out of the car alone, two tails wagging at me. It assembled easily, and it really wasn’t a big deal, but when it was done I felt powerful. The hardest part was probably that it was a job for two: you can’t really balance one end of the crib while you’re trying to attach it to the other and it’s further away than your knee or shin or elbow or whatever might be able to hold it. And I should have asked for help, and Steve was right there. But something about those facebook photos seemed epic, all of them accumulating together, telling some important piece of a story of a way that we prepare for children. I was glad for my addition to it, standing alone in this mess of a room — Rosie’s old room, her bed still in it — filled with baby gadgets. A room entirely too small for all this stuff, with a pack-n-play my parents bought propped up on the bed, and a cosleeper with boxes of clothes inside instead of a baby, and then this crib I got off Craigslist, and my dog underneath my feet, and I assembled the hand-me-down crib that matches nothing, and I was sweating a little, big and awkward and overly proud.
