Priorities

J and I have begun the process of amassing the furniture we will need in the coming months, since my womb is going to be considered tight quarters in late December and having easily accessible and destroyable electronic equipment lying around the living room is a bad idea. To aid in that goal, I have been reading Craigslist ads seeking various used household items and attempting to pillage every second hand store in the area, hoping to score some decent, safe pieces of nursery and other home furnishings.

Looking for furniture on Craigslist makes me mean. As I scroll and click through the posted ads, I can not help but make fun of the spelling errors and mentally harangue sellers asking full price for used goods, based on the theory that the goods in question were barely used. One of the more fascinating threads is the number of people selling convertible cribs, using the ability to convert the crib to a bed as a selling point, then stating that they have only had the crib a year or two. If you don't intend to convert the crib to full use, why are you using that as a selling point?

It was in this frame of mind that J and set out to find a crib this past Saturday. Previous scouting visits to price new cribs had left us both with severe sticker shock, as some places would only sell the full suite (crib, dresser, changing table, etc) and others were charging as much money for a crib as we paid for our entire bedroom suite, sans mattress.

Because of the sticker shock, J and I have decided to set aside the repeated exhortations that we only purchase a new crib and that anything less means we want to kill our alien, reasoning that somewhere in the city there exists a respectable, decently priced, safe, used crib.

Not so far. Our first stop, which we mistakenly assumed was a warehouse of used children's furniture, turned out to be a thrift store raising money for children's charities, no crib was to be found. This did not stop a volunteer from spending an excessive amount of time trying to convince us to purchase one of two incredibly ugly, completely unnecessary changing tables. Polite attempts to shake this individual were meet with an increasingly hard sell, akin to an encounter we experienced with a used car salesman last summer.

A jaunt across the street to a second, charity-related, thrift store produced two cribs. The first was leftover from a daycare center, as it came with plexiglass panels and a mirrored back, better to observe an alien without causing a disturbance. J recognized it immediately, as it was the same type of crib used in the center the alien will be attending when I return to work. The second one appeared to be missing several pieces. J was perfectly comfortable with buying the plexiglass model and calling it day. I, on the other hand, reasoned that if the crib was in poor enough shape to be banished from a daycare center it probably had no place in our home.

Our third stop was at a used furniture warehouse down the street from home. Although there were no cribs available, the furniture was beautiful and J found an entertainment center to home all of the aforementioned electronic equipment in a manner that is not kid accessible. Four days later and he is still pondering purchasing the unit.

Our final stop on Saturday was at the Shadyside Arts festival, to look at the work of an artist and children's book illustrator named Kana Handel.

Kana Handel creates beautiful, fanciful paintings of teapots and mermaids, children and anthropomorphic animals such as cats and rabbits. She works with a mix of media including watercolor, ink washes and sumi on Washi. After seeing her work at the Three Rivers Arts festival in early June, I spent the rest of the summer mulling over her work. And I decided that one of her paintings was an ideal addition to the nursery walls.

I ended up purchasing two paintings. Terrible of me, I know. I hear the chorus singing about my skewed priorities. I hear them chanting about how I'm putting the alien at risk of very bad things happening, because I spent money on art instead of a new crib. I hear them scolding my response that my brother and myself slept in dresser drawers as infants (my parents were not expecting twins) and many babies sleep in vibrating bouncy chairs, moses baskets, in the parents bed and in co-sleepers – anywhere they will actually sleep.

I purchased the paintings anyway. When the alien is ready to return to the mothership in twenty something years, the paintings will go as well. If the alien decides that they are not alien-worthy, then I'll hang them in our bedroom instead.

J and continued the hunt while hanging out on Sunday morning. As I wandered through the furniture and appliance section of Craigslist I stumbled across an item on our ongoing wish list – a year old chest freezer of just the right small size for an obscenely low amount of money. As our visits to large box stores have increasingly included a stop in the large appliance section to ogle the chest freezers and compare prices, before moving on to the over-the-stove convection microwaves (to replace our current model, which is dying key-by-key) and flat screen televisions. (1)

Sensing an opportunity, I pointed the add out to J, wrote down the phone number and suggested he call to see if it was still available.

It was. The problem of how to get the freezer from the seller's house miles away to our home was quickly resolved with a phone call to J's parents, who happened to reside in the same town as the seller. Off J roared in his beloved Porsche (2) to borrow the caravan and pick up the freezer.

Hours later, two vehicles return. J's father in the caravan and J and his mother (who apparently spent most of the drive pressing down hard on the imaginary passenger brake and telling J not to waste that money he just saved, because his parents purchased the freezer for us as an early Christmas gift, on a speeding ticket) in the Porsche.

The freezer was not completely free. It came complete with a lecture about cleaning it thoroughly to get the cat smell off of it (which neither J nor myself could detect) and commentary on the small ding on the top (its used, dings are expected). J's father finished with a guilt trip about not coming to Sunday dinner, J's mother with the application of pressure to be allowed to hold the freshly newborn alien via a story of how wonderful it was to hold one of the other grandchildren at only an hour old.

I gently explained, for the umpteenth time, that I would only be in a hospital if something goes wrong in the next 17 weeks. If I remain healthy, I will be at the birthing center and no one would be informed of the birth until I was released and back home, as the last thing I want while trying to bring the alien in the world sans drugs was my in-laws anywhere near me.


(1) J and I have a philosophy about electronics and home features we dislike. We do nothing and hope that the object in question will eventually die. This philosophy would work well if it did not take us years to replace dead items, as we also have a rule that home purchases must have the agreement of both parties to be legitimate. Because of this, the hideous dining room light/ceiling fan which died the summer after we moved into our house is still attached to the ceiling, we have yet to order the other sconces to match the one we like in the living room and it was almost eight years into our marriage before we got around to purchasing a bedroom suite.

Regretfully, our current television refuses to die and has somehow managed to survive through several electrical storms unscathed. We thought the last storm, which occurred right over our house would finally put us out of our techno-lust misery, but no such luck. The set works perfectly, shows no indication of giving up anytime in the near future and will continue to work even after public mention just to spite me.

(2) In one of life's finer ironies, J purchased his much longed for two seater convertible (a 1998 Boxter in exquisite, almost-new condition) in late December. Less than four months later I was pregnant. Did you know that Porsche can install a special switch to disable the passenger side airbags and sells custom fitted infant and toddler car seats? As the first thing J offered to do after he stopped laughing over my pregnancy announcement was to offer to sell the car, one of the responses I'm considering giving when people ask what they can get for the baby is “Money towards the disable switch and infant/toddler seats for the Porsche”. Because J is that spectacularly awesome and deserves, at all possible, to keep his dream car. And for those who have commented on how nice it is for me to “let J keep his car” – how insulting can you get?