With my parents here this weekend, we took the opportunity to finally get some basics in place for the matter of the new baby, due at the end of the month. We made countless trips to the local strip mall to pick out a crib and a mini-crib to fit in our bedroom and changing table. We also generally stocked up some baby supplies, although we did not have a good “feel” foe what exactly we needed. We had actually forgotten a lot in the last four years since we had Claire. Uh, what do we need? Diapers, I guess? Don’t we need some wipes or something? What do babies wear? It is too early for baby food?!?!

We spent the rest of the weekend assembling and arranging said crib and changing table. The crib was not too bad to assemble, just standard please-assemble-this-at-home stuff like you might expect from Ikea. The changing table was another story. It looked simple enough in the store, but I was dismayed to find that it consisted of 128 separate parts and something like 68 different screws, all packed neatly in a deceptively simple looking flat rectangular box — an extremely heavy box. It took both me and my parents a lot of grunting and gasping to move the box from the car to the front door. I could not carry it up the stairs by myself. The simple act of unpacking the box and taking the outrageously heavy components upstairs individually took about 45 minutes. From the instruction booklet, it appeared that if I were to accidentally put one of the irreversible screws in the wrong place, then the whole thing would be ruined and we would have to go back to the strip mall and start the whole process over, probably after dumping another $300. Fortunately, I was astute enough to complete the project, after some sweating and cussing, without incident, and we did end up with a functional but disappointingly understated changing table, considering the effort put into it.

Kit, being pregnant and all, was mostly able to offer moral support. And my parents entertained Claire, although she wandered up from time to time just to see what I was yelling about. Anyways, we sort of have a place to physically put a baby now, which is good since she is due just around the corner. I don’t think it would have been appropriate to ask her to crash on the living room sofa at this point.