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David Spates Does a baby need a Trapper Keeper? If I didn't know better and if I weren't so
well-rested, I would suspect that the baby has already been born.
The kid is still days away from determining who will walk away
with $17 in the hotly contested Chronicle baby pool, and
yet my house is already full of mysterious, yet brightly colored,
contraptions. Thanks to a recent shower, we now have enough
ammunition to sustain the baby battle for many months, although
in reality I suspect that I soon will discover that a baby can
deplete a well-stocked house in a matter of days rather than
weeks, so perhaps my feeling of preparedness is overinflated.
Still, from where I sit, it seems like a lot of stuff. I've never been a parent a day in my life
but as the days tick away until what our physician estimates
will be a birth sooner than later, it's clear to me that having
a baby means having stuff. The trick is determining what we'll
need vs. what we'll buy, and at this point in the game I have
no clue what we'll need. It reminds me of buying school supplies as
a kid. Every August my mom would take me and my sister shopping
for school supplies. So there I am in the school-supply section
of our favorite mart. There were a few things that I knew for
certain I'd need -- pencils, erasers, a Trapper Keeper with the
Velcro fastener. However, there were certainly much more to choose
from than just pencils, erasers and Trapper Keepers. What does an aspiring third-grader need to
conduct top-level studies in Cedar Bluff Primary School? I didn't
know. I knew what I needed for second grade -- pencils, erasers
and a Trapper Keeper, but that was second grade for cryin'
out loud. Certainly third-graders would be operating on a higher
plane of academia. If I were to walk into the first day of third
grade with second-grade-type supplies, I might be the laughing
stock of the entire class. For all I knew, the teacher might
take one look at my woefully insufficient pack of provisions
and determine that I needed to be in the remedial class down
the hall. So, needless to say, picking the right third-grade
school supplies was crucial, or so I thought. So what does a
forward-thinking third-grader need? A compass? Perhaps. We might need to draw
perfect circles in the third grade. Freehand circles are OK back
in second grade, but this was third grade - the big time. Pens? Pencils are fine in second grade, but
maybe third-grade teachers demand the confidence and self-assuredness
that working with pens represents. College-ruled notebook paper? Sure, those
wide lines are fine back in second grade, but at some point the
college-ruled notebook paper would find its way into my studies.
Third grade might be the year. Elmer's or Glue Stic? Paste had always sufficed
in kindergarten through second grade, but paste is for babies.
I was a rising third-grader after all, practically a man. Certainly
the days of making a turkey from a tracing of my hand were over.
Third-graders need serious adhesives. Maybe I'd even need a small stapler. I had
heard from my older friends about the big research papers they
had to write in the third grade. They told me about 500-page
theses they struggled through. Certainly paperwork like that
would call for some serious collating. Maybe a stapler wouldn't
even do the job. Maybe I should be thinking bigger -- something
like a three-hole puncher and metal-ring binder. My point is that when I finally got to third
grade I quickly realized that I really didn't need a lot of things
I thought I might. In the end, all I really needed was a pencil,
an eraser and a Trapper Keeper. I suspect the same will be true,
to a degree, with baby stuff. There are probably lots of products
that sound good in theory but just aren't that applicable in
reality, and there are probably a handful of things that we'll
use every single day. My pencil, eraser and Trapper Keeper is
about to be replaced by diapers, burp cloths and a car seat. Still, it's a lot of fun to sort through all of this baby stuff. Like I said, my wife recently was the guest of honor at a baby shower. She had a great time, and we got a lot of things that I'm sure we'll need. I'm anxious to find out what among the pile of goodies will be the real necessities. Who knows? A vibrating bouncy seat might turn out to be as indispensable to a parent as an erasable pen is to a third-grader. |