I was relaxing at the rescue squad recently while a colleague groused about all the work he's been doing preparing a nursery for his first child. Painting the nursery was the irritant du jour.
His wife had given him a specific design — something with pretty horizontal stripes that meet in the middle and then diverge at right angles. Something cute. He was to use one color on each side and a second for a center stripe. They're having a boy, so soft blues are heavily involved in the color scheme, and there have been lengthy deliberations over the precise shades. This was taking a while, given the almost infinite variety of shades of blue. Another colleague listening nearby shook his head, chuckled and asked, "Whatever happened to eggshell?"
Recollecting the obsessive preparations my wife and I undertook before the arrival of our first child, I'm sympathetic. The nesting instinct is powerful enough. But add the anxiety common to impressionable first-time parents, mix in dubious claims from hawkers of infant educational products, blend well with innumerable ads for legitimate supplies and you have a recipe for some pretty amusing behavior.
When my wife and I were arranging the room for our first child, we went through many of the same exercises my friend is going through. We had to find a crib with precisely the proper amount of scrollwork in the molding (took us two days to find JUST the right one), the bedclothes had to coordinate with the wall color, the mobiles had to be appropriately enriching, entertaining and hung at just the right height, the dresser had to be in aesthetic harmony with the crib and there had to be at least four pacifiers in the crib at all times.
But that's not all! Also in the crib we placed an Ocean Wonders Musical Aquarium attachment, as well as toys and colored cards with faces and geometric shapes on them so that our baby would have new neural pathways created wherever she turned. And of course the radio stayed tuned to classical music on WDAV. Everything had to be engaging, cute, cuddly and coordinated.
This obsession with cuteness starts with the nursery and carries over into everything else new parents do for their first child. It isn't enough that there are elaborate murals or paint and wallpaper combinations worthy of Versailles. No, parents can't stop there. We need elaborately carved cribs, luxury baby bedding with embroidered thematic designs and hardwood changing chests with decorative knobs. Some of us even poke holes in our children's bodies. What does it gain a 3-month-old girl to have pierced ears?
Some outgrow this by the second child. For others, the desire for winsomeness never ceases. And do the babies care? Not at all. They don't care if their crib is from Target or Barney's. Forget the cashmere receiving blankets. All babies need are safe homes, loving smiles, tender hands and patient voices.
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