Beloved Baby Gear

Do other parents get emotionally attached to the gear they use to care for their babies and the clothes their babies wear?  I do.  When Nora switched from newborn clothes to 3mo clothes, I remember being more excited than sad; she had a lot of cute 3mo clothes I couldn't wait to put her in.  Retiring those clothes to replace them with the 6mo clothes left me with a tinge of remorse, though.  She's so little that she still fits into her 6mo clothes, but I anticipate getting nostalgic when it's time to cycle them out for the 9mo wardrobe.

I felt the same way when I was putting away her swing the other day.  She hasn't used it much in a month or two, and it takes up a lot of room next to my bed, so I was actually kind of looking forward to putting it away.  But when I was disassembling it, I started thinking about how we bought it after 3 or 4 desperate days of taking turns holding her around the clock when she was sick.  It took up so much room next to my bed that it displaced her sleeper bed, and she slept in it while it was turned off for several more weeks until we moved her into her own bedroom.  It reminded me of how, for the month or so that she was impossibly colicky, the best part of every day was when she'd wake up happy and I'd roll over and see her swaddled and smiling at me from the swing.  Billy and I would laugh when we'd put her down to sleep for the night and she'd crane her neck backwards to be able to see the TV, requiring us to drape a shirt behind her to block her view.

Packing away her cloth carrier this week was even harder.  As Nora's gotten bigger, this carrier has put more strain on my shoulders and has become less "hands free."  She wants to see everything around her, so she leans back and cranes her neck around when she's in the carrier, and the carrier is too small to keep her anchored securely to my chest.  This means I have to hold one hand behind her at all times when she's in it.  I purchased a replacement carrier-- the Ergo-- which comes with strong endorsements from moms who wear their babies constantly.  Because it has a waist belt that distributes the baby's weight to the wearer's hips, it can hold children up to 45 pounds, and it also allows me to wear her on my back instead of just in the front.  At the rate Nora's growing, I'll be able to wear her in this carrier until she's 10.  : )

So while my Baby K'Tan carrier's lifespan might have been shorter, I can't say enough good things about it.  I love this thing and am legitimately sad to be packing it away.  It quite literally saved my arms, my back, my legs, and my sanity when Nora was colicky.  If you spend any time online reading about colicky babies, you will discover posts by people who claim their babies did not stop crying for hours, no matter what they did.  Thankfully, I discovered early in Nora's colic that if I put her in the K'Tan and bounced on the exercise ball long enough, she would always stop crying and eventually fall asleep.  This never failed, and for the entire month of December, I spent several hours a day bouncing like this.  I think I will always remember sitting on the ball with Nora in the carrier for the duration of watching Midnight in Paris and The Help back to back because every time I tried to stand up, she'd wake and start screaming.

We have a Baby Bjorn, as well, but Nora has never liked that one.  I guess Baby K'Tan's claims that it replicates the womb are legitimate.  It was also so easy to get her in and out of it because of its double loop design.  When people would watch me wrap her up it, their response was always the same: "How does that thing work?"  I don't blame them, because just looking at the directions for using the Moby (another popular wrap carrier) makes my head spin. My carrier is also the only thing that allowed me to take Nora out in public during that colic phase because she would scream her head off in her stroller.  My baby doesn't just love to be held, she demands to be held, and even when she was crying, having her wrapped up close to my heart and knowing that she would calm down if I kept at it long enough soothed me, too.

My friend Krista has given me countless bits of excellent parenting advice, but recommending this carrier was easily one of the most useful things she's ever said.  It could have cost four times as much and still would have been worth every penny my sister paid for it, and I'm so thankful to her for not blinking an eye when I said "Look, this thing isn't on my registry because it has to be purchased online, but I need you to get it for me."  If you want to know what one thing I could not have survived Nora's first 6 months without, it's this carrier, hands down.

Maybe I'll someday grow to love the Ergo just as much.  Maybe I'll take Nora to even more memorable places in that one than I have in the K'Tan.  But the K'Tan will always hold a special place in my heart, and if I'm fortunate enough to have Baby #2, I know I will be excited to get it back out and use it to wrap up my brand new baby.  It feels kind of stupid to be writing a love letter about an object, but it's quite simple, really: This carrier is the first thing that made me feel like a good Mom, and I will always cherish the time I've spent snuggling my baby in it.