It’s a Girl

The baby-products industry is sort of like the pet-products industry: an endless opportunity for you to waste money on your beloved offspring/animal companion. Pet products, however, have the virtue of being relatively easy to figure out; there are only so many ways, after all, of putting a collar on a dog, rhinestone studs or no. But baby products? Most seem designed by the fiendish demons of parental torture.

Our first challenge was clothing, via the wrap tops supplied by the hospital. Each top was printed with the words “This Side Up” on the front; this seemed cute at first, but after wrestling with the crossover folds and confusing snaps (in strange places like armpits), we decided it was a literally twisted joke. (As you can see from the photo, all three of us are still struggling with these confounded tops at home, in a version that features not just crossover folks and weird snaps but, bizarrely, ribbon ties.)

Next came cloth diapers. When my brother was a baby, you basically flung a diaper around his squirming legs, tried not to stab him with those enormous diaper pins, and wrapped him all up in a plastic diaper cover. Nowadays cloth diapers come in all kinds of fabrics and designs (as do the covers), and you’ve got to master a variety of folds and funky closure devices (such as the Snappi Fastener). It’s mentally overwhelming. And the all-too-dirty little secret of cloth diapering is that we’re still using disposables at night to avoid major messes. Sigh.

Third came the hippie sling, that piece of simple-looking cloth that so many happy parents seem to wear with ease. Not us. There are plenty of options in the sling department, including the Moby Wrap and the Kangaroo Korner. Our version was the popular Maya Wrap, handed down to us by our friends Elaine and Phil. It came with an instructional DVD — a warning sign if there ever was one.

We slung, twisted, looped, and cursed our way through what felt like floppy origami for babies. I racked my visual memory to imitate all those women I’d seen in Guatemala, casually tossing their tots on their backs and wrapping them quickly and efficiently in a piece of cloth. In the end, we managed to sort of get the baby inside the sling and sort of wear it correctly. Next challenge: carrying the baby around the house in the sling without banging her head into the kitchen counters.

Finally, nothing compares to the physical hell of installing an infant car seat. (And that’s not even mentioning the clueless design of the stroller that snaps underneath the car seat, which features cup holders for steaming lattes directly above the baby’s body — the proverbial accident waiting to happen.) Most new parents in the First World are familiar with the excruciating pain of the car seat, which can feel akin to that of an iron maiden. Our seat demanded three separate installation efforts ( Caleb, Caleb and pal Stan, Caleb and my dad) before ACTS Oregon pointed us toward the professional help available at American Medical Response, an ambulance company.

Ninety minutes of belt-tightening and seat-crushing later, Dea the intrepid AMR car-seat expert had explained the generic principles of correct car-seat installation (yes, it’s OK if it flips up from the front several inches) as well as the specific principles of getting our seat to fit in our car (let’s just say that spongy shelfliner and swimming noodles were involved). We left feeling very secure and very much in love with Dea. And she did it all for free. Shocking.

Now if only the word would get out to other parents that yes, there are such things as car-seat-installation experts. It might reduce the numbers of incorrectly installed seats — by some estimates, as high as 82 percent of all car seats.