We try to contain you

A little over ten years ago, I arrived home from abroad with the exciting knowledge that the puppy I had chosen before leaving would soon be old enough to come and live with me.  In that brief interim I did a lot of shopping, choosing pet toys, food bowls and a crate to double as a bed.  I went the round of the pet stores; none of these things were inexpensive.  Some survived our first six months together while others were chewed to bits or broken.  I learned a lot, too, about the utility that dogs bring to objects of all kinds: a cardboard tube could bring young Arthur as much enjoyment as a brand-name chew toy.  (I also learned to keep my laundry basket above floor level, after more than one occasion on which he raced through the living room, a bra flown aloft from his jaw as if the pennant of a winning team.)

Since then I have spent very little on everyday dog accessories, reserving my money for high quality crates and breed-and-age specific food.  Vet bills take up any budgetary slack.  For bedding, the dogs sleep on cheap pillows inside coarse-fabric pillowcases, and harvestmother has made each of them a jauntily-patterned blanket in polar fleece.  (The puppies have currently commandeered Fern’s pretty pretty princess blanket, to her resigned acceptance.)  Toys are plush rather than plastic, which tends to get eaten, save for a small collection of spiky chew-balls that are Arthur’s sole provenance.  Most of the pack’s stimulation comes from us and each other.

I have been thinking about all of this as the señor and I enter the vast and hitherto unknown world that is equipping a house for a baby.  Until recently, much of our discussion has centred around how best to lay out the small spare room for an infant, without precluding its conversion to a child’s room in future.  You know a little already of the renovator’s ouroboros this has created.  We have also thought a lot about how to live in the house once we share it with a baby; specifically, how to divide up our space so the dogs have room to live and the baby lots of dog-free room.

My entry into the second trimester this new year brought a poignant revelation from harvestmother: that she had begun assembling a layette with our first pregnancy, and had quietly continued this task in the few months between it and our second.  When she set out what she had brought together from her circle of knitting and crafty friends, I was carried away as if on a wave of hormones.  The tender simplicity of all the items: their handmade, homemade origins, the preponderance of pastels and images of small animals.  It was like the childhood days in which I set out the dolls’ clothes that belonged to the bakelite newborn doll that had been harvestmother’s before me, only this time, the goods would be filled by a person, not a simulacrum.

The señor’s mother and her sisters, too, have been bringing forward items from the South Hornby empire that is the señor’s family home: objects larger but still tender with history, a new family member to be housed by items that have already done the same job for others.  This too seems crucial and utterly welcome in terms of locating our future daughter in her time, place and people, and again removes from us the responsibility of choosing the equivalent items in an environment of offshore mass-production.

This generosity extends beyond the family sphere too, as I learned when an officer of the union furnished me with a bag of baby girl’s clothes she had sourced from her daughter’s school fair, a pastel spectrum of styles practical and decorative, all with the requisite shoulder and leg snaps and the enormous, nappy-covering seats.  It puts me in mind of an episode of The Goodies or The Jetsons in which the lead characters slide into outfits already prepared.  These clothes are sentences in need of a subject, who waits the while in the wings.

This having so much of what we need and yet with three months still to go is a strange seat in which to sit.  It coincides with the gift vouchers we have yet to spend remaining from our wedding.  With this last point in mind, I suggested to the señor we browse the baby section of a certain department store long established in this city; perhaps there might be some single precious object or possible heirloom to which we could put our nuptial largesse.  Failing that, I rather liked the look of a Peter Rabbit-themed nappy bag I had seen online.

The experience was strangely anti-climactic.  Since this is the store in which one can buy a $700 toaster, I perhaps should not have been surprised at the curious specificity of the items on sale.  The image I had in mind of a colourful mobile — inspired by the bright colours and shiny objects with which Brenda is surrounding her new daughter — brought no match in reality.  Even a wall of soft toys based on characters of Beatrix Potter failed to lure us.  As the señor put it, Arthur kills hedgehogs and rabbits are vermin.  If we fill the baby’s world with them now, we must necessarily in future explain the inconvenient truth.  The nappy bag itself I liked, but with no particular knowledge of what makes such a product effective (and no other nappy bags on sale) could not in good conscience buy it without doing some comparative shopping first.

So here we are, in reluctant-consumer limbo, joyfully furnished with so many essentials from the people dearest to us who await our daughter’s arrival with cheerful optimism, and largely open to the pragmatic realities of parenthood that we’ll learn with neither sleep nor much mental acuity.  The fact I don’t like shopping reduces the likelihood of a spending spree on unessential items before her arrival.  Yet a baby is not a puppy, to be entertained with a cardboard tube, and that pre-literate, pre-continent world before our enthusiasm for books and music, day and night, converges, needs special furnishing of its own.  I need to think about this some more, in my usual idle way.  Some scale of the coming adjustment can be anticipated by the señor just this morning pointing me in jest to “Peter the Conqueror“ from Something Positive (and not recommended for those of you whose fidelity to Potter’s stories and images is greater than mine).  There is a nexus of kawaii, practicality and stimulation within which the right minor items for baby exist, and which in a few months won’t matter much anyway.  We haven’t found it yet.