When Bad Design Happens To Good Babies

There are two groups that are constantly targeted with pure crap, with the assumption that we'll buy anything at an inflated price if it makes our hearts go SPROING. (It's only fair, every ad running during football season uses as its premise that men who like sports will buy anything if it makes something else go SPROING.) Anyway. Those two groups are "brides" and "new moms."

The sheer amount of overpriced dreck that was flung at me as soon as I made it known I was planning a wedding could have drowned a whale. Caterers doubled their prices. Bakers tripled them. Stationers hid all the stylish options and coated every invitation with unadulterated twee. Rented halls threw in white twinkle lights and tulle banister wraps and called it a Wedding Package for four times the cost of, say, a retirement party. And don't get me started on the shoddy construction of nearly every dress I saw. I guess charging five hundred bucks for a dress with unfinished seams is rational considering the wearer is so irrational that she's paying five hundred bucks for a dress she'll wear once.

After my wedding, I dusted off my hands thinking I was done with this marketplace weirdness.

Oh, I was SO WRONG.

Stuff for babies less than six months old falls into two groups. Group one - designed by someone who has actually met a human infant, and is aware of the sheer amounts of unpleasant bodily fluids generated from every orifice. Group two - designed by people who think "oh, a teddy bear, mommies looooove teddy bears."

For the record, I have bought a wedding dress. And I also have dressed my child in an outfit I knew was a bad idea as soon as I realized the sleeves were tailored with no stretch. I don't know what that says about me, but probably nothing good.

This outfit tricked me. The long line of front snaps (creating a large head opening), the snap crotch (diaper access), it said convenience. In practice, it was like trying to put a tuxedo on an octopus. It combined the annoyance of a pullover outfit with the nitpickiness of snaps. But it had a teddy bear!