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9:21 a.m. - 2009-04-10
buying furniture

We are going to the baby furniture store to buy a piece of furniture. I have never bought a new piece of furniture. Everything I have ever had, in terms of furniture, has been given to me by relatives or friends or purchased at a yard sale or craig's list or something. My dad once wanted to kill me when I made him take me to one of the neighborhoods in Pittsburgh that is on the news every night for shooting incidents to buy a used mattress and box springs. Everything in this house, most of which is new, Kevin has bought and I consider to be "his" even though if he, say, chokes to death on a piece of danish, it will all be mine. (The magic of marriage.) He did buy me a new desk when I started grad school, but, still, I have never shelled out in the triple digits before.

Given my ability to survive for my 12 years of adulthood without spending more than about $20 on anything that exists to hold sweaters, be sat on, slept in, or eaten at, it is a really big adult moment to bite the bullet and make such a purchase. We will be buying a dresser for the baby. I have never bought myself a new piece of furniture, but I am perfectly willing to buy one for someone I've never met, who will probably never appreciate that it took her mother two full 8 hour days of work to earn it. In fact, in five years, she'll probably omplain about it because it's not the cool set of white and pink princess furniture that Suzie down the street has. At which point I will hand her a can of white and extremely toxic paint and make myself a stiff cocktail.

But these things happen every day when you're a parent, don't they. You skip the cool pair of jeans that you would wear every weekend for five years to buy your kid a new jacket that they will grow out of in 6 months. You write a check for daycare where they seem to pick up every infection known to man, instead of for a trip to the Bahamas. Aparently this does not stop when the children grow up, as evidenced by the following: My mother bought us an awesome, gigantic squooshy chair for the nursery instead of putting it toward a new car, and my mother in law is buying us a crib and mattress pad instead of, like, signing up for some overnight bus trip to a craft show. The only difference is that now, at 30, I think I really am finally beginning to fully appreciate all of those things. Starting with the fact that our mothers carried us in the womb for 9+ months and probably skipped a lot of activities they might have enjoyed partaking in - like a night out for sake and sushi at Nakama with the ladies (I stayed home and watched The Office and ate 3 soft tacos from Taco Bell.)

So, this purchase of a dresser, even though the nursery is nowhere near ready to welcome the little peanut, will be the final major piece for the room, well, once we actually purchase the crib for which we are being given money on Sunday. This is kind of a big step for me.

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