Blinging up Baby

WASHINGTON – The past few weeks have not been peaceful ones in our household. The baby has been demanding all of our energy, day and night. Our sleep is intermittent and fitful, riddled with nightmare visions of basic necessities yet unpurchased. Weekends, once respites to be relished, are now marches to be endured: to Buy Buy Baby, Babies ‘R’ Us and Target, in pursuit of stuff, more stuff, stuff we absolutely, positively must have to keep our baby safe and stylish and comfortable and clean and content.

Things are bound to get worse once the baby is born.

Like many parents-to-be, my wife and I are spending our last few babyless weeks in a panic-purchase feedback loop. Anxiety and uncertainty fuel impulsive trips to baby-goods superstores, whose gargantuan inventories only beget more anxiety and uncertainty, to which we – good American consumers that we are – respond by filling an oversize shopping cart until it’s difficult to steer. (“Honey, do we need one of these vibrating Pack ‘N Play play yards in Ivy League print with optional canopy accessory? Are you sure? The mother on the package seems awfully happy that she has one ….”)

So far we have managed to avoid splurging on some of the more egregious examples of baby bling: the Bugaboo Frog – at $729, the current “it” stroller among brand-conscious urban sophisticates; the wool-and-cashmere baby blanket (with matching plush horse toy) from Hermes, which will set you back $1,040; or the extravagant kid-scaled furnishings to be found at PoshTots.com, where the guardians of today’s Little Lord Fauntleroys can find that $8,900 handmade bombe vanity the nursery is practically crying out for.

There will always be those who don’t mind using their children to broadcast their wealth, but for the most part, America’s $6 billion-a-year baby gear industry thrives on two seemingly incompatible mindsets that tend to coexist in new parents: terror and schmaltz.

On the one hand, the industry would have us believe that the material world is wholly inhospitable to children – a place where all table edges are too sharp, all tap water too hot, every strap and string a potential noose. On the other hand, they proffer a pastel petting zoo of a world, embroidered with ducklings and lambykins, where all is eternally soft and sweet and cuteness the only currency.

One trip to a local baby-goods superstore reveals the strange sight of first-time parents zigzagging frenetically between these two poles: cooing at kittycat-emblazoned booties one moment, stressing out over carbon-monoxide detectors the next. The pressure to give in and buy one of everything – from a talking car seat to a “Kick ‘N Play” piano that a newborn can play with its feet – can be intense.

For some it can be immobilizing.

“I didn’t have anything until about six months into my pregnancy,” says Traci Zambotti, 36, of Washington. “My old college roommate called me and said, `What have you got?’ And I said: `Nothing.’ So she immediately came down to visit and took me to my first baby store.”

When they arrived at Babies `R’ Us in Silver Spring, Md., Zambotti found the experience of entering its 37,000-square-foot space “overwhelming,” she says. “I was paralyzed. I just stood there in the front of the store. We decided we had to go get lunch before we could even go in. We didn’t even buy anything that day.”

I met Zambotti and her 9-month-old son, Joey, at Wonderland, a neighborhood bar here that hosts a “Baby Happy Hour” every Wednesday evening. For two or three hours midweek, moms and dads get together on the bar’s second floor to commune and commiserate, their babies sitting on their laps or crawling/toddling nearby.

Mara Mlyn, 39, of Washington, bounces 9 1/2-month-old Ezra on her knee as she recalls the guilt she felt at not having a fully decked-out nursery ready and waiting when he arrived home from the hospital. In the middle of an 11th-hour renovation, Mlyn and her husband had moved kitchen supplies into what would become Ezra’s room. In the place of mobiles and bassinets were microwaves and blenders.

“I was one week from my due date,” she says, “and all my friends were talking about their nurseries – how great their nursery was, what kind of crib they got – and we didn’t even have a room for him yet.” Though she knows, really, that Ezra didn’t care, Mlyn says she couldn’t help feeling her new baby would hold the dust and detritus against her somehow.

“I didn’t want to bring (Ezra) into his new house through the basement,” she says, though that was the way she and her husband typically entered. “I didn’t want that to be the first thing he saw.”

Mlyn and her husband fell into a trap all too common among new parents, says Vicki Iovine, author of the best-selling “Girlfriends’ Guide” series of books, including “The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy,” “The Girlfriends’ Guide to Toddlers” and “The Girlfriends’ Guide to Baby Gear.”

“It’s a very well known fact that once you find out you’re pregnant, you do the least sensible thing you could possibly do, which is to move, remodel or add on to your house,” says Iovine. “Then, if you have a couple of weeks where you’re theoretically `overdue,’ you start painting. And of course you don’t believe that any carpet a stranger has ever walked on can be a safe place for your child to crawl and play.”

Iovine urges new parents – and especially new mothers – to take a deep breath and stay calm when faced with the vast sea of supposed “must-haves.” But she knows it can be hard to stand up to aggressive product marketing – not to mention parenting books and magazines filled with alarming anecdotes – aimed directly at this emotionally vulnerable population.

“When I had my first baby, my mind had already gone to all the darkest places,” Iovine says. “It almost didn’t matter that they were feeding off my paranoia: `Prevent this, prevent that. Prevent your child from getting his hair caught in the bottom of a Jacuzzi and drowning. Prevent your child from inadvertently boarding a plane and leaving the country.’ All you do when you’re waiting for your first child is read, and as you do, you keep creating more anxiety as you hear about all these things that could possibly happen.”

Christina Vercelletto is the products editor at Babytalk magazine, an offshoot of Parenting magazine. She encourages parents to trust their instincts over the thousands of gadgets designed to do what moms and dads should already be doing themselves.

Without mentioning it by name, she alludes to the Lenox Juvenile TattleTale Smart Child Seat – equipped with sensors and an audio track that chides your squirming child should he or she undo the latches or otherwise try to escape – as an example of a gadget on which parents can grow too reliant.

“Batteries die, and electronics stop working, and someday that car seat is not going to talk when it should have, and the mom will have fallen out of the habit of checking the straps herself. That’s the danger, and I think it applies to a lot of things you see on the shelves that would seem to safeguard your baby’s health and safety.

“Nothing can substitute for the vigilance of the parent,” she says. “You are the first line of defense. Anything else you might buy after that is backup. There’s no product you can buy that’s going to substitute for a watchful eye.”

Vercelletto says there are really only a handful (or maybe a minivan-ful) of things brand-new parents should definitely have. At the top of the list is a properly installed infant car seat. (“That’s essential; they won’t let you out of the hospital without it.”) Second is a stroller – “one that goes with your lifestyle,” she says, assuaging this reporter’s guilt for going with the $49.99 Kolcraft Universal Car Seat Carrier over the $2,800 SilverCross Balmoral pram favored by Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Roberts. And third is a good sturdy crib, though “used cribs or hand-me-downs are out of the question,” she says, citing safety considerations.

Vercelletto says she couldn’t have raised her own children without a bouncy seat. “You’re going to need someplace just to put the baby,” she says. The most tricked-out among them, she gushes, “have lights and toys on them; they have vibrations, massage, all kinds of bells and whistles. I found that I really used mine all the time.”

Clearly there’s room in any new parents’ “must-have” list for a bit of personal discretion. Necessity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

To which I can only add: Behold the Original Crumb Chum bib, with patented, unique chin-to-toe coverage! Behold the BebeSounds Angelcare Movement Sensor, which sounds an alarm should your baby remain still in his crib for more than 20 seconds! Behold the Dex Baby Wipe Warmer with Changing Light, which, according to its manufacturer, “takes the jolt out of cold wipes!”

And to my due-at-any-minute baby: Ready when you are – almost. I just have a few more quick errands to run….