When It Showers, It Pours

This summer I have been to about ten showers. No, I am not being hyperbolic, as is my usual wont. I'm talking the last month I have gone to one every weekend. I actually feel quite blessed to have so many friends. And of course I learned a lot about the layout of BRU before needing it for myself. But it really is quite amazing. I have been offered a lot of cake in the past three months.

I forgot to mention the most amazing thing about yesterday's BRU experience. When I told the "Congratulations!" lady that I was adopting a one-year-old girl from China, she burst out "Have you seen the food chiller?" It's as if something about my situation directly triggered her response. Anyway, I said I had not seen it, and she droned on about it for a while in a way that was completely abstract to me and I instantly forgot. But when I was returning the gun, she repeated, "Did you get a chance to look at the food chiller?" I told her, quite frankly, that I had missed it completely, but this had the unexpected result of causing her to leap out of her chair and announce, "I'll go get it for you." Synthia and I waited patiently and she soon returned with a unit--pardon my vagueness as I honestly think I've blocked some of this--that looked a little bit like a rubber bracelet with a rubber hole on the top, covered by a loose balloon of nylon mesh. She said brightly, "You just pop a hunk of frozen meat in there, and the baby can suck on it all day, getting nutrients and a taste for solid food, while you gain the confidence of knowing that she has no choking risk!" I thanked her for this helpful tip and we left the store. As soon as the big glass doors had closed behind us, I murmured to Syn, "Is it weird that I kind of threw up in my mouth a little when she described how that food chiller worked?" Syn said she had felt the exact same way!

Anyway, it just goes to show there are products out there that exceed our wildest dreams. ;)

Here's a classic: today my pessimism about the glitches in both my registries was validated when I called both BRU and PBK to find out why I was unable to access my registries on line. The BRU problem was a simple missing e-mail address, but the PBK problem was that the very competent-seeming gal from yesterday had listed my shower date as "October 15, 2020." I think maybe she bored her beady eyes to the depths of my soul and decided, "Well, that's about when we can expect YOU to have a child." Even more frightening, when I reported my suspicions to the gal on the phone, she laughed, which caused me to try to bond with her by making a slightly lame comment about how we'd be traveling to my shower on space ships, to which she agreed, "Yeah, that's in, like, a hundred years!" Oof. Wanna bet she's never had a fertility problem? ;)