the baby phase is over and i'm not sad but i am
a very firm contradictory statement in honor of my toddler, who is very hungry but he's not hungry.
I sold our high chair. Yes. The high chair is gone. The high chair we - that is, Man-Piece - spend hours researching, choosing between features and price, and finding balance of both. I didn’t know that I would want the fancy wooden Swedish thing that can work for babies until the kid is like 8 sitting in a full-size grown-up chair, so we had a giant plastic Graco 5-position monstrosity that didn’t fold up for 5 years. Fine.
It worked great, tray was washable, sat both my boys when they learned how to eat, how to feed themselves, how to not gag on food, how to chew, that they love avocado all over their faces, that Mama WILL indeed put endless puffs on the tray for dinner on days when she’s feeling a certain kinda way and watching Law & Order SVU instead of cooking homemade baby food.
The 5-position thing is funny because of course we wanted to graduate each kid from sitting separately from the table to sitting AT the table, attaching the chair part to one of our kitchen chairs. But the chair part was so huge and our dining chairs curve around a tiny bit on the sides so it didn’t fit.
Anyway, the day J - not yet 2 and a half years old, declared he no longer wanted the high chair but wanted to sit at the table WIKE CHAWEE (like charlie, big bro), I listed the chair on Marketplace while he ate his first meal in a booster seat at the table. The very booster seat that C declared HE no longer needed because he was big enough to just sit in the regular chair like a regular grown-ass person. So, damn. Boys growing all over the place up in here.
The mom came by to pick up the chair only 2 days later, and as I showed her all the buttons and levers that I literally never used, helped her get it down the stairs so she could load it into the back of her minivan, I had a moment of stupefaction. I was in a hurry to get back inside, because I had left J upstairs playing by himself which as you can imagine is both fine and dangerous, but I felt the need to pause and watch the chair be taken away from my house. I realized I wanted a moment of silence for this small and very rushed, yet landmark occasion. I wanted to commemorate it, or recognize it somehow.
High chair! Gone! Forever!
If you have a baby and visit my house, I cannot seat them! You will have to bring your own thing! No more watching Muffin climb the high chair to get at whatever is crusted onto and into and under!
No more endless puffs dumped onto the tray because I can’t be bothered to serve anything that requires more than one step. No more buckling the littlest into a seat I know he will be safe in and cannot tip himself over to crack his head on the floor. And that’s not even hyperbole, because at least a handful of times since the transition to booster seat in a kitchen chair, J has somehow managed to successfully tip himself over either into the table or backwards, and in both scenarios I think we’re lucky it didn’t precipitate a large urgent care bill. Cool.
Now that this landmark occasion has occurred, there is no longer a place I can lock him up to have a quiet moment to pee by myself or whatever, and know he will not be harmed or bring harm upon himself. I have to actually keep eyeballs on him, at all times?! So annoying. Parenting really asks so much of us, ya know?
The next landmark I can’t wait for is ditching the stroller. It’s coming soon, I can feel it. Much like the high chair, I deferred to MP on all these large baby accoutrement decisions because I was super anxious and avoiding reality. The only decisions I wanted to make when pregnant with our first kid was which maternity sweatshirts I wanted to buy and the frequency of prenatal massage that would be acceptable.
Unlike my lukewarm feelings towards the high chair, my feelings towards the stroller are ice cold. I detest that thing with the passion of a woman who regrets not taking charge of decisions 5 years ago and now deals with the consequences alone, being the primary user of the item.
MP insists I’m a drama queen about it and exaggerating my feelings and disdain, and maybe I am, because it’s fun to be a theatrical rage queen. And maybe I want to go back and be a chic new mom with a cutesy leather-handled stroller that handles like a luxury German sedan and folds up with a demure nod of my head. And maybe I also don’t care about it that much, except that it’s a daily minor annoyance and we all know how those are the things that break us. And maybe I need to calm down, but again: theatrical rage queen = fun.
It’s another toddler contradiction: I care, but I don’t.
I mean, that stroller took C to Disney World twice, to the park down the block a few thousand times, a handful of delightful museum visits, a few hundred hours of walking during COVID until he got too old and didn’t want to do hours long walks with me anymore. It carries both boys, when they’re exhausted from the park and Charlie convinces J to sit on his lap so I can push both of them up the hill back home. It carried C on slow walks in his newborn baby carrier when I was nursing my bruised tailbone, limping around the neighborhood wondering if anyone could tell I was wearing an adult diaper, wondering if my limping was obvious, wondering if I looked normal, wondering if anyone would speak to me while hoping no one would try, wondering if anyone could tell I’d been crying all day and that getting outside was a significant victory.
So. It’s just a stroller. It’s just a high chair. But both of these items are symbolic of a very specific life phase. And one of them has left my house, forever. [to anyone who is thinking, “famous last words, sara,” let me assure you: it’s forever.]
And so, I bow to and salute past Sara for getting us here. She wasn’t sure, about anything, that she could, or would, but she went on. And now, the 4 of us sit at the table together for dinner, and weekend breakfast. And the boys try to kick each other under the table, and talk to each other about how one has milk and one doesn’t like milk, and one doesn’t like roasted potatoes but did you know that potatoes is what fwench fwies are made from and it’s the same thing and you should try it, because you won’t know if you like it unless you try it just like Daniel Tiger, remember? And MAMA JAMES IS FEEDING MUFFIN FROM THE TABLE AGAIN. And eventually I’ll be buying 4 dozen eggs once a week to turn these boys into men, and teaching them how to cook and nurture themselves because I’m not their servant and stg I will not allow children of mine to become incompetent icky fuckboys who don’t know their way around a toilet brush or a frying pan or consent.
Let’s end before I go off on a sweet-boys-to-annoying-men tangent, shall we?
Cheers to that high chair. May you hold the next families babies as well as you did mine.
k. loveyou. bye.
moment of silence for the high chair... and for the Sara who got her babies to this point <3