Showing posts with label Week 16. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Week 16. Show all posts

Thursday, 3 September 2009

No walk in the park

Last weekend we went to 'Baby Dump'.

The name? Don't ask, I don't know.

While it sounds like the setting for a Stephen King novel, or some sort of shrine to infant excrement, it is simply a baby goods store.

The kind of place that would have made our faces explode just 4 months ago, it still felt more than uneasy walking around there, but we had a scouting mission to complete.

Eye opening, to say the least.

Did you know that you must have 154 different types of baby seat/bassinette to attach to a stroller?

You need one kind to carry the kid to the car, another for in the car, another to remove him from the car, another to bring him back in home, another to rock him to sleep in, another to have him actually sleep in, another for Tuesdays, another if you need to go to the supermarket, and another if you plan on coming home again.

All of these need different adapters to connect to the one Über stroller that you will have remortgaged your house to buy.

You didn't know that? Idiot.

Each of these seats come with their own colour coded set of accessories too. Rain covers, sleet covers, snow covers, fog lamps, alloys, bear traps, fire extinguishers, and flick knives.

All available in midnight magenta and sea-surf blue, all essential enough to make not having them akin to child abuse, and all costing a day's wages.

Then you have the mini sleeping bags because blankets are just so passé, and you never know when your stroll in the park could turn into a trek across the arctic circle.

We left with half a dozen brochures and no idea about what we might need or not need.

What the grump-with-a-bump and I did learn is that transporting nuclear waste is less complicated and expensive than taking a baby to the post office.


Monday, 31 August 2009

Today I put away childish things

When I was younger there a sound that never ever failed to excite me, whether listening to it or mimicking it.

Whoow-Whoow, Whoow-Whoow, Whoow-Whoow.

KITT.

David Hasselhoff's genius car in Knight Rider. The laser would Whoow-Whoow back and forth on its bonnet, and you knew something brilliant was going to happen.

For hours after every episode it was commonplace to repeat the sound until my face hurt. Whoow-Whoow, Whoow-Whoow, over and over with the accompanying facial expressions of a randy goldfish.

Even today, twenty or twenty-five years on, I catch myself making that sound. Whoow-Whoow.

Today, I heard a very similar sound. Noticeably faster, and with no pauses, and no full-stops.

Whoow-Whoow, Whoow-Whoow, Whoow-Whoow, Whoow-Whoow, Whoow-Whoow. Over and over again.

A heart beating. Our kidlet's heartbeat. Fast, constant, and strong.

ET, the midwife, and I, respectively lying, standing, and sitting. All three of us holding our breath with instinctive silence, listening for the first time to someone who didn't even know we were there.

Eavesdropping. Broadcasting its first unwittingly audible movements to an outside world it knows nothing of. A pre-natal pirate radio, that we were privileged to hear for a few moments.

Just stunning.

The sound has been going around my mind ever since. After a quarter century I finally see the sound of the Knight Rider as outdated.

I'll still mimic the sound in my head, only from today on it will be noticeably faster, with no pauses, and no full-stops....