A Few Thoughts On...

Toys

At first, there was one specific place for them. A cute little basket, tucked away unobtrusively on a shelf. But slowly the toys started to migrate. A few in the bathroom for bath time. A few in the kitchen for meal time. A few in the living room so we didn't have to run up and down the stairs. A few in our bedroom - nobody seems to know how those got there.

A baby requires 24-7 entertainment. An unreasonably small portion of that entertainment is provided by sleeping. The rest is up to us. A single toy carries an interest factor of approximately 3.2 minutes. There are some toys that can be used more than once in a day, but only if it's been several hours since the first time, and you must be prepared for the fact that the interest factor for the second use is reduced to about 2 minutes. Also, there are always one or two toys that, for some inexplicable reason, cause the child to scream in terror when they are produced. (In our case, a friendly-looking stuffed ice cream cone that makes a jingling noise when you shake it.) Of course, there's no way to know which of the toys will be that kind until you've already purchased, unpackaged and thoroughly scrubbed down the toy so that it can be safely presented to the child. Accounting for these oddities, plus the few toys that are, let's face it, really more for you (the baby isn't going to be much interested in a lego Starship Fighter for quite some time, if ever), and based on 720 minutes in a day, with an average interest-level time of 3 minutes per toy, I calculate that to entertain a 10-month-old baby, you need about 275 toys. Glancing around the living room right now, that seems about right.

Fashion

Shopping for a baby is far less depressing than shopping for oneself on several levels. Even if an outfit is a size too small and covered in regurgitated peas they can still pull it off. Also, I can easily find adorable outfits for my daughter that cost ten dollars. She never complains that her ass looks too big in something - after all, it's mostly diaper, and she knows this.

There's really only one drawback to shopping for an infant: the guilt trip. It is incredibly easy to make a parent feel guilty. In fact, you don't need to try. Chances are they feel guilty already. This summer I was shopping for my daughter at Osh Kosh B'Gosh where I was delighted to have found these delicious teeny little t-shirts embroidered with flowers for only five dollars each. Score! But when the cashier was ringing me up she asked, "Do you have enough shorts to go with these?"

I would have thought zero would be enough shorts for someone who is twenty-six inches long, but apparently I am the WORLD'S WORST MOTHER because I had NO shorts. Only shirts. What did I think my daughter was - Donald Duck, going around wearing only tops and no bottoms? Who allowed me to procreate anyway? "I-I, uh, wanted to wait and see how many I, er, already have at home," I stuttered lamely. The cashier shot me a withering look that said she saw right through me and, as soon as I was out of earshot, she'd be calling social services.

But guilt trip or no, I really have no choice but to shop constantly for my daughter. She outgrows stuff so fast she's like the Incredible Hulk. I put her down for a nap in a neat little outfit only to find her an hour later half naked with the ragged tatters of her clothing hanging off her limbs. Which brings me to my next thought:

Size

My daughter is 10 months old, and fast outgrowing 18 month sizes. According to the doctor she is in the 99th percentile for height and weight. But I don't think she's the freak the sadists who draw up these charts would like me to believe. Because when I started asking around, it turned out that ALL the babies are in the 90-something percentile. Now, I'm no statistician, but isn't that, like, impossible? Seems to me we need some new charts. I'm guessing these are the charts used in 1886, when people were all generally no more than 4 feet tall and had waists 13 inches around, roughly the size of my dog's. Meanwhile the clothing manufacturers are blindly and faithfully following these charts and creating minuscule socks that wouldn't have fit my daughter when she was a four-month fetus. But that's okay; I can use them as finger warmers. She can totally pull that off.