Last night we spent more than one hour in Buy Buy Baby in Chelsea. I am almost ashamed to type that. I felt like such a fraud that I kept touching my stomach in that way newly pregnant women have, hoping people would take me for one - I feared their newly-heightened senses of smell could sniff me out as "not one of us" and they might take me down, tearing me limb from limb like hyenas. In the end, though, I decided that it was fine. In a few short weeks, we will be in the thick of it. We will have entered the Trying To Conceive world, and it might not work. We do not know how long it will take, but it is very likely that it will not be immediate. And that we will be bitter, if for no other reason than that we are dropping a grand a month to try and make this puppy. So we may not feel like gleefully poking fun at bassinets and "Breast Friend" pillows and scary looking animal characters on onesies. So now was a good time to go. We are still hopeful. We are still happy and excited. Let the pregnant women sniff me out. Let them stare.
Certainly they had reason to stare. My sister is visiting and she and Wes and I spent a considerable amount of time playing with the two $800 strollers. Wes was concerned about their abilities to "emergency stop" - apparently he anticipates many occasions when the stroller's brake must be suddenly THROWN ON to avoid danger. We pretended to be strolling along with the Xplory or the Bugaboo and to have a sudden strolling EMERGENCY and then threw on the brake to see which one was quicker. We were laughing SOOOO much. Wes is the best husband ever. But I digress.
For those of you not in NYC, the Bugaboo is EVERYWHERE. Park Slope is brimming with them. Because of this, we had a HUGE bias against it - and I, not usually the type to care what other people have or don't have - was just as against it as Wes, for once. If you're going to spend that much money for a stroller, I thought, it had better be pretty fucking unique.
So we went into Buy Buy Baby to examine the Stokke Xplory up close and personal. It has long been my favorite online, and while I continually told myself we would most certainly NOT be spending that much on a stroller, I still secretly thought that I might ask my parents for it as a shower/Christmas/birthday gift once I'm pregnant. It's truly magnificent to behold online. There's a 7 minute video showing its many varied functions and abilities, complete with varied mood music for the various Dutch babies of different ages. I loved it.
And then we met it. And it was... sort of... plastic-ish. Really plastic-ish, actually. I wasn't so thrilled. I thought it drove well, and I loved that the baby can be seated so, so high up, away from exhaust and closer to human eye contact. But... it was made of plastic, in the end.
And the hated, much-maligned Bugaboo.... truly, a work of art. Amazingly engineered. Lightweight aluminum frame. A wonderfully cushioned handle (comparable to the feeling of, say, my Saab's steering wheel). A turning radious you wouldn't believe. A feeling of quality in all its parts. A wonderful verstility. A stylish, clever machine. I know that I sound like a parody of myself at this point.
I wanted to hate it. I am still shaking my head at it. How can this be? How, for once, can the masses have gotten it right? At least it's Dutch (like me).
We've decided we'll get it in black so that it will be less conspicuous.
