Beyond Babies

So, my friends Julie and Adam have recently adopted a newborn son, the arrival of which has been anticipated for many years. I can’t help but be excited for a child that has been welcomed into such a loving home and has been so wanted for so many years before being brought into the world. It is very touching to have followed the whole process.

Anyhow, there is a shower for Julie this Saturday, and I last night I made a trek out to a store called Babies R Us to retrieve a registry item to bring for the shower. Now, I have been in these types of stores on a few occasions due to the birth of my sister’s son and my brother’s daughter all within the last two years. So, maybe I’ve been to this type of store two other times. And each time I go I am totally confused about everything. I think, “This should be easy. I mean, I even used to BE an infant at one time in my life, so I should be able to figure this stuff out.” But I can’t help but feel like I’ve walked into the gift store of a zoo of exotic pets. Babies are truly exotic to me. They are interesting, sometimes even fascinating, and I love ‘em, but I feel as if they are a little beyond my realm of comprehension, in spite of being the young of my own species.
Most of the items on the registry list were already purchased, which was fabulous; the list of foreign objects was narrowed down to a mere few. And the item I decided to buy was a clear swing gate to put in a doorway. (I can say what I bought this because Julie and Adam, like most of my real life friends, are beyond sites like Friendster in the same way that I feel beyond babies.) While checking out, I had to resist the urge not to say “You don’t look like a baby to me?” to the Babies R Us cashier. I’m sure she’d want to serve me up a good knuckle sandwich for that one, so like I said, I resisted.

Also, as I was checking out, I was thinking that perhaps I was drawn to the gate over all the Baby Einstein videos and DVDs because of my association of babies with exotic pets. In fact, the baby on the box was pressed up against the clear plexiglass of the gate, smiling blissfully at a beautiful woman on the other side peering in at him. It very much resembled a photo from some indoor zoo terrarium.

Son-of-a-bitch it was, to wrap that gate. They have a free do-it-yourself wrapping statio
n to go to after you’ve made your purchase. I made it a game to try and wrap my large box faster and neater than the couple next to me who was having difficulties wrapping some kind of a child seat that looked like it was for the bathtub…geez…I don’t know...It wasn’t like the car kind. Anyway, they have the tape dispenser bolted to the table and it doesn’t even have the sharp edge so I had to cut each tape piece with scissors while strategically holding my pastel-paper-large-box-origami in place. The paper wasn’t even wide enough to cover the front, so I worked swiftly to diminish seams from multiple sheets and tidy the corner folds.
I won the race and the man of the couple unit applauded and stood in awe of my professional wrapping skills of such a large box all by myself. I must say, my mother trained me well in the wrapping arts.

I went to put the box in my car, where Mars (my baby) was in the back seat sniffing out the window, excited to see me return, tail wagging. He was notably disappointed when I told him the box he was sniffing wasn’t for him. It was then that I decided to make a trip to pick something up for my own baby, some chew treats he likes: retriever rolls and a Budda bone. He can be very particular, my large, four-legged, domestic kid, though less maintenance than the exotic ones.