Of Cribs and Men

I took down the babies’ cribs last night… a sullen reminder that, in fact, they’re not babies anymore.

My son pretended to kiss his crib goodbye, while his twin sister nearly broke her foot on the scattered remains. The three older kids – all past inhabitants of said cribs themselves – were completely oblivious; and my dear wife, of course, tried her best to fight back tears.

As for me (i.e. the guy actually doing all the work), I just kept rolling the same thing over and over and over again in my mind: Damn - these things are a helluva lot easier to take down than put up!

May 2003 - I was in our old house sitting on the floor of what soon would be the babies’ room, surrounded by countless rails, spokes, screws, safety latches, bolts, Allen wrenches, et cetera. The room was a mess. I was a mess. A 25-year-old guy who had never even held a baby, and there I was building not one but TWO cribs for our forthcoming twins.

I don’t remember every exact detail of that particular day; but knowing me, I’m sure I whined to my wife about how hard I worked putting the cribs together… and then I’m sure she suggested we go out to dinner… and I’m sure once we were out we decided to go catch a movie… and once the movie was over we probably scooted over to Barnes & Noble to browse through the zillions of “how to be a parent” books that we most likely didn’t even buy… and then we probably headed home and actually watched SNL live so as to conserve future recording space on our standard VHS cassette.

Boy, have things changed.

In the eight years since I first built the cribs, we’ve moved, I’ve changed jobs and we’ve welcomed a grand total of five wonderful children into our lives. We can’t go to the movies or out to dinner on the spur of the moment anymore – hell, we technically can’t even put our children in a confined space to sleep anymore – but that’s just as much a part of parenthood as lying on the floor covered with seemingly endless pages of incomprehensible “EZ-build” assembly instructions.

According to my math, I have assembled, adjusted and disassembled the cribs eighteen different times – and that’s it. The crib phase is officially over; the bunk-bed phase has begun… and I only hope I can enjoy those last few remnants of innocence before that evil leap to puberty swoops in and changes everything.