No, you didn’t?!! Yes. Yes, I did.

You know how much I didn’t want to fill up my house with brightly colored baby crap. I dreaded it. I’ve babysat for kids who’s rooms you couldn’t even walk across because a two foot rainbow of plastic toys (that they didn’t even play with) blocked you at every turn. I wanted to retain some of my adult sophistication even though I live in an apartment that is falling down around me. I figured I could entertain a baby with my bright personality. Who needs store-bought gadgets that play music and give you a headache when you can make anything you want out of a toilet paper roll? The best toys are things you already have, right?

I had never encountered the era of the bored baby. The shrieking, the crying, the tears and the sad sad faces… I figured out that almost 90% of the shrieking was because she gets bored easily. She is her mother’s daughter after all. She yells if I don’t pick her up and walk around the house with her. She yells if I walk around the house in the same areas too long. She yells if we don’t take two walks a day. She yells when I am changing her diaper if I’m not tugging at the string that makes her parasol mobile flutter over her head. She yells if I don’t rock her fast enough or if I keep reading from the same page in a picture book too long. This baby has an Mtv attention span and she hasn’t even seen Mtv yet!

So I broke down and ordered a baby activity center. I ordered it last week and tracked it’s progress every day as if my life depended on it. I thought, as soon as the activity center gets here then all my problems will be solved. I’ll get to do the dishes again, pay my bills, organize my spice cupboard and maybe wipe off all the drips on the stove… Maybe I could finally get that big freelance job done and start working on cleaning up Toby’s office for him.

Ha ha ha ha ha HAH! I’m so stupid.

Baby Bug loves her activity center, she does. She loves all the funny dangling things and the music doesn’t even drive her crazy. I was so worried that all this stimulation would hurt her little brain but obviously I underestimated the capacity of Baby Bug’s little brain.

My new problem is she only likes it if I’m playing with her in it too. I try everything. Sometimes I pick it up and drag her across the floor in it. I stick my head in under it and we kick and play together. (She’s much more coordinated with her feet and legs than I am with my feet and legs.) I make up songs about the dingly dangly things. We dance to the peppy Mozart tune… It’s a lot of fun. But I’m still not getting anything done and there is still a lot of shrieking going on.

So what’s next? An exersaucer?

I might as well kiss my dream of being a minimalist goodbye.