I’ve always scoffed at the quantity of things some people pack in order to travel with babies and small children.
This was before I became a parent.
In the past, I have mercilessly and openly made fun of my sister for the endless train of paraphernalia she lugs around for my nephews. Two rambunctious miniature people, who could be physically trapped and dissolved into giggles, if I draped myself overtop of them. (And I often did.) So it always surprised me that my sister had so very many bags. Items for entertainment, nourishment, care, clothing and overall ‘stuff’. All of which managed to somehow be completely necessary, for people that you could essentially sit on.
‘Just let them play with sticks’ I would suggest unhelpfully.
This was before I became a parent.
I was firm believer that I would be completely immune to this plight of having excessive baggage for my offspring.
I envisioned myself wearing the baby, tucked snugly into her kangaroo style carrier. My hands both freely swinging, perhaps even holding a small bundle of wild daisies to hand out and wave along the way. Slung effortlessly across my shoulder would be a wispy light, almost silken bag, containing one change of clothes, a single diaper, one ‘moist towelette’ to wipe the hardly ever soiled baby bottom and that single adorable rattling type toy, that would never get boring because it would just be that cute.
People would look at us in awe, as the fresh smell of clean linen and daisies wafted by in our wake. All of our baby related baggage would total the collective weight of three wet feathers. Because babies are small, so their baggage should be proportional to their size. Tiny.
“Our baby just doesn’t need much stuff” I would whisper in a wistful, slightly superior way. Then hand out muffins – that I had just baked fresh for the occasion. For every occasion.
This was before I became a parent.
Fast forward to packing for a week away at a cottage vacation with a horde of family members, who all flew in from Trinidad just to come meet their brand new baby. (To clarify when I say ‘cottage’ I mean a totally luxury house that just happens to be on a lake. The place comes with Wi-Fi, linens, and a coffee maker.) So it’s not like we have to pack extra because we will be roughing it.
I am wrestling the Dr. Browns 8 bottle sterilizer into a bag, pondering which pack n’ play sheet set to take, how many bouncy chairs to bring (we inexplicably now own three), figuring out the math and ratio of clean diapers versus how many times our infant will likely explosively poop every day, calculating what sort of blanket to puke ratio we might be faced with and genuinely wondering how someone so small ‘requires’ so much STUFF.
The fact that our daughter, who hasn’t even gotten around to growing her own functioning teeth and knee caps yet, has luggage that totals 274x times her teeny body weight makes me question how much of this bullshit is just bullshit.
All of a sudden we are people who bring suitcases to a cottage. But this is life travelling with a baby.
I suppose the truth is that technically babies don’t really need these ‘things’. The slightest observation of other non-western cultures and the sheer fact that our species have thrived for millennia on this planet prove that very well. But our societal style of parenting encourages and celebrates us when we have products for our products.
Do we really need?
Do we really need to own and have to remember to pack a NoseFrida®? (which is basically a tube with a filter that you use to suck the boogers out, it sounds horrific but honestly, that thing is the best).
Will I ever get back those collective hours of my life spent sweating and swearing, trying to figure out how to install an infant car seat?
I am sure that as a baby I was wrapped in a blanket and probably just weighted down with a brick in the backseat of a car.
The type of safely harness systems we (very rightfully) have these days seem to need a degree in mechanical engineering to use. Each time I am plagued with worry that I have done it wrong and our child will be suddenly catapulted out of the car, like in cartoons. Car seats also take up a stupid amount of the comfortable backseat space.
I was so sure I would never get caught up in the consumerist cycle of collecting so many gadgets to help raise our daughter. But a few weeks after she was born I caught myself in the second hour reading Amazon reviews. Searching for the best, most efficient bottle warmer with the fastest heating capacity. I realised that I had become engulfed in the quest for gadgets to make life with a newborn seem easier. Incidentally the promise of having to wait 13 seconds less for the bottle to warm at 3:47am while someone is screaming directly into your face, is the exact product I will add to my online cart.
Even in the most paired down style of parenting babies need everything from us. Because their absolute core of survival is based on dependency. Complete and utter dependency for their every surviving need. It is humbling, terrifying and exhausting. The level of neediness that human babies are born into is shocking. An ice-cube in a frying pan is probably more independent than a human baby.
And in the quest to get it all right, overwhelmed by the sheer desire to give your first-born the best chance that she can get, you will one day wake up to a life, surrounded by a mountain of things. Most of which will be remarkably unnecessary. You will then become an expert at packing everything into the car, like the first people to ever invent the game of Tetris, and after changing the baby for the 17th time you will be ready to leave.
But truthfully despite all the effort and excessive packing involved in parenting, there is nobody cuter I would rather be a luggage carting servant for.
1 Comment
sitting here with Don in his little mission control room we have just been looking at your latest blog
about traveling with baby it is amazing love ya De Mudder