Week 25: Shopping for our little imaginary friend

24 weeks: part deux.

(N.B.: I begin this post totally aware that this is a prime example of my verbal incontinence and how I can talk forever without really having much of a point at all. Bite me.)

My husband and I are not shoppers.

I must tell you that one of the greatest joys in our relationship, and you may not appreciate this, is that Christian and I both hate to shop. We spend less time in a mall/store/supermarket than probably any couple in history, and our shopping visits are always pretty highly optimized. We’re in and out in less time than it takes me to get grumpy, usually, and that’s pretty damned impressive. (Approximate limit: 10 minutes.) I so married the right man. My mother may be able to spend hours trolling Target and WalMart – she and my brother are both master shoppers – but I did not get the shopping gene. Probably a good thing for my credit rating, actually.

On the other hand, what many of you may not know is that we also do not own a car. This is not because we couldn’t get one, but because we chose not to have one. Yeah, yeah, we’re a couple of those people – Christian is certainly more of one than I am, but intellectually, I agree with it, so that’s how we’ve been living for a long time. Even when we lived in Los Angeles. (It is totally untrue that no one walks in Los Angeles – it is only true that those who walk are considered beneath the notice of those who do not.) I actually sold my car about a year after Christian and I started dating, although to be fair, it was more because that car cost more money to maintain than it was worth and had suffered greatly during my brother’s adolescent years from various kinds of unknown teenage abuse. But what not having a car now means practically is that we rent a car about once a month to do big shopping/run big errands/etc. And only having a car once a month means that when we have this car, we usually have a horribly tiring day doing all of the big shopping at once, and that day is full of shopping.

A day full of shopping. I would totally trade that for a day filled with root canal work, possibly without anesthesia. I am not kidding.

A day full of shopping. High-efficiency shopping, but lots of shopping nonetheless. Now, I mentioned that we hate shopping, right? And that we can usually get out of a store with what we need before I get grumpy?

Well, that’s getting out of one store. Getting out of five stores in that time isn’t going to happen, and so these are usually crappy days, especially since I am the designated shopping driver. Not that Christian can’t drive, but he doesn’t want to, and conveniently, he didn’t get a U.S. license within his first six months of being here, so he can’t drive on the license he has. I hate driving, and I hate shopping days.

Now this post, believe it or not, is actually not about how much I hate shopping. It’s about where, for us, shopping gets really weird.

A couple of weeks ago, when Christian came back from DefCon, we rented a car to get him back from the airport and to do major shopping the next day. And this major shopping for us was something new… we drove to an outlet mall to go shopping. An outlet mall. This in and of itself is a sign of the apocalypse – we drove out-of-town to go shopping, and we went to an outlet mall of all places. We, the high priests of the Holy Sovereign Nation of Shopping Sucks Ass, made a trip to Mecca for shop-a-holics. There were seriously people there who were taking pictures of each other at the outlet mall. It was a like vacation destination for these people.

It creeped us out.

But what’s scarier is that we did something I’d never even thought of doing before… we bought stuff for someone who hasn’t even started breathing air yet, who cannot yet be embarrassed by his parents, who can’t even be appalled by Karl Rove yet. It was a little like buying crap for an imaginary friend.

For two people who hate shopping, I assure you this was an absolutely surreal experience (only made weirder by the salesperson at Carter’s who was giving us all sorts of advice that applies to normal couples who are really interested in doing everything according to tradition, but mainly just made the pregnant lady with the highly sensitive nose here notice that the woman doing all the talking had probably had what my band friends in high school would have called “the liquid breakfast”…).

We bought stuff for our child for the first time. You don’t think that would blow your mind, especially if you’re not someone who has been looking forward to just how much baby stuff you’re going to get to go out there and buy, but if your baby is not primarily an excuse for a fun buying fiesta, this is pretty damned weird.

We managed it, but after buying a suitably small number of starter clothes (mostly onesies, a couple of pairs of pajamas, receiving blankets and various things we knew would get spit up on a lot), we immediately rushed out into reality to buy a couple of pairs of sensible shoes for the two currently tangible people in our relationship and two sturdy suitcases we’ve been looking for for approximately 100 years. And then got the Hell out of there before Rod Serling returned from the dead to give a synopsis of our day to the viewers out there in TV-land.

Because Christian and I? We do not shop. And certainly not for unborn snuggly alien symbiotes who currently do not exist outside of me, however lovable they are. And shopping for our imaginary snuggly alien at an outlet mall? The Holy Land for drivers of SUVs and Hummers who commute an hour to work one way every day and always drive with a cell phone in one hand and a latte in the other???

You are out of your freaking mind.

Ok, ok, so I am exaggerating just a bit. In retrospect, I would be lying if I didn’t say that there was a part of buying clothes for our son that was sort of neat, actually, but it was quite frankly bizarre.

Of course, we did find this, which I think is Teh Awesome (click to embiggen):

I may hate shopping, but I think that all kids should have cool hats and snuggly things with ears on them. He’s due in December, so… it’s appropriate. And sooo soft.

I am a total sucker for babies wearing teddy bear hoods. I have no idea why.

But the bigger part of my shopping aversion is that I feel tremendous guilt spending the money. Now, imagine that you hate shopping anyway. And you don’t like to spend money. And you’re buying clothing for someone who doesn’t even have a birth certificate yet???

You may be able to see why buying baby stuff hasn’t been on the top of my list, and why it felt so weird. When we bought all of these clothes, it had not really hit me that this baby was real and was going to be born. I just knew intellectually that it would be a bad idea to try to take a baby home naked in December and keep him that way until I woke up enough to buy him clothes, somewhere around his 4^th birthday. Now that Small Monster has started poking and prodding and rolling over in my belly so that I can feel him, all of a sudden, I feel like I have a license to believe he’s real. And, of course, he is, but if you’ve got as much ingrained pessimism as I do, it takes just a little longer to get to that point. And all of a sudden, it’s like – wow, there is stuff this kid needs. And there is stuff I need to prepare for him. You know, to prepare for this child of ours that will be here, in our house and will be our kid. Because, you know, we’re having a baby. Did I mention that before?

Excuse me, my head just exploded. I’ll be a minute while I clean up.

And this kid? He’ll be here in 3 ¹/₂ months. Really.

And so I did something voluntarily today you’d never imagine me doing – I spent about $100 at amazon.de on various children’s rhyme/finger play/song books and CDs in German, because German will be our language at home, and I totally realized I don’t have that long to get used to all of the things I totally take for granted with babies in English. Sure, I can have a conversation in German, but baby/toddler games and songs in another language? Totally cultural, and totally not taught in class. You may wonder why I care now, since the baby won’t be able to talk for a good while, but children passively understand language well before they can actively produce it, and all of those little rhymes and songs we all heard as kids are important to language learning. And the part of my brain that used to teach preschool and au pair is totally ok with me spending the money. The linguist is standing there cheering in the background too. And even the part of pessimistic part of me that worries that something will go wrong before the baby is born and that this might all be for naught, the part that cringes at the idea of spending money, was like, yup, this is a very good idea. Good show, Krista.

I spent money… on something for our baby… and I am totally ok with that. I even enjoyed shopping for the books/CDs (ok, it was online, but still), and I spent a while browsing and deciding. But the really big deal is this: my brain has finally moved from the idea of yeah, ok, I’m pregnant, to yeah, ok, we’ll be meeting our child soon, and it’s time to prepare for the way my husband and I want to raise him.

So I may hate shopping, but shopping for the kid for a good reason? That was actually kind of awesome.

Excuse me, I have to go. The four horsemen are at the front door and are looking for a place to stable their mounts.