18 Years Ago: May 4th--Baby's room

Crib, October 1997

I started thinking today about the room we readied as the baby's room before Simon was born. By May 4th, with a baby due on the 9th, I expect we had things mostly set up. We had moved my office/studio supplies down to the basement to make the room available. We bought a crib from a neighbor and decked it out with blue bumpers and a battery rotated musical mobile. Another music toy hangs on the outside of the crib in this photo, which shows Simon at about five months old. I had to look for a while in the photos that never made into an album before I found a single photo of the furniture in that room.

Changing table, July 1997

Markus and I kept things as minimal as we could. We purchased a lot of baby clothes at a second hand store called Once Upon a Child. We liked vivid colors more than pastel. And we hung mobiles. The second photo shows Simon on the changing table. I remember a blue terry cloth cover for it, but in this photo he's lying directly on the plastic surface. Perhaps a wet event occurred during this particular change. The photo was taken in July when Simon was two months old. We secured the changing pad on top of my Granny's old dresser, with the drawers holding various supplies. The dresser mirror was mounted to the wall next to the table, doubling the play of the Rainbow Fish mobile. Our babies were always velcro strapped in.

It's a lot of fun to look through the old photos for this blog series!

Memoir (and I consider this series to be an act of memoir) involves a lot of gaps to fill. I have no documented activities for May 4, 1997. Instead, I'll allow myself some good guesses.

May 4, 1997: Perhaps I tied the blue bumpers to the inside of the crib and smoothed the sheet over the mattress. Waiting. I have no note of an activity like swimming, so maybe I did that exercise video again. I'm sure I ate and slept. Walked. Maybe I grocery shopped. This baby could come any day (but don't get too excited--experience says this baby will be late).

May 4, 2015: I've had a day of tying up a few ends that have needed tying for some time. I went to the USA for three weeks at the end of March and enjoyed a busy time of visiting (Ann Arbor, Oberlin, Minneapolis) and helping my parents prepare to move. All that was stimulating and exhausting enough, but I capped things off with four days in Minneapolis at the AWP conference (Associated Writers and Writing Programs). It takes a while to recover from hanging out with 12,000 writers. This evening I took a jog with Markus and Miriam. Well, they ran off ahead of me, and I did a short round on my own. But it was enough to get the endorphins pumping and coat me in sweat.