How white my shirts can be

All right, we're committed to this. We just bought our first real baby swag.

Carly and I went with some friends to a baby junk show last weekend and it was awful. Just... awful. I always expect, when you go to an aggressively marketed show where the keynote speaker is Rosie Pope, who has made a fortune out of duping people out of their money for useless baby shit, that we will be aggressively pandered to. And almost as soon as we walked in the door, people were handing us flyers and brochures and asking us for our email addresses for raffles and BIG PRIZES and other nonsense. I'm reasonably certain that we don't need a doula or placenta encapsulation, but it was kind of interesting to see the gadgets and things that really do seem to work. One guy invented a backpack/child carrier for older kids to stand on your shoulders at a concert. It was really neat, and the guy who was hawking the things looked like a real hacky-sack professional.

I was really turned off by the voracious nature of the beast, though. There was a great photographer there who had a great deal for baby/maternity photos, but we didn't want to buy into it right away. Carly asked if she could have a flyer or a business card and he just smiled at her and refused. "No, we don't give out our cards. You buy the package now or... no." So yeah, fuck you, photographer guy. That kind of shady marketing makes me think that what they're really doing is trafficking children from the Balkans.

But there was this one thing... one thing that, when we were frightened away from the Britax display with the TERRIFYING CARNIVOROUS ROBOTIC TALKING CARSEAT, we found quite surprising: The ERGObaby child carrier. It's basically one of those backpacks for hauling babies around, but designed to carry either on the front or back. The young woman at the booth was friendly and put up with my random questions, and she said, with apparent candor, that the things are great and they sell themselves. She admitted she regularly carts her 25 lb kid around in the thing and barely notices he's there.

Then, today, I get an email about a sale at REI.com, and decided to see if they have one of these baby carriers. Lo! and Behold! they do. And 25% cheaper than Amazon. A quick survey of craigslist shows that these things sell for about $115 new, $90 new. I bought it for $86 (plus tax) and get to pick it up at the REI store in SoHo.

So, that's it. We're committed to this thing. The return period will pass before the kid is born, so... guess we gotta have the thing.

One more thing: PLACENTOPHAGY is just a limited form of cannibalism.