Ancient History

I read the whole bugaboo debate on Silicon Valley Moms Blog, and realized that I am so out of it that I don’t know what a bugaboo looks like; I wouldn’t recognize one if it crashed into me at Whole Foods. And that all my parenting knowledge is so, like, old-fashioned.

    I used to have the parenting thing down! With three kids spanning seven years, I knew all the brand names, I could spend hours discussing different brands of diaper covers and strollers and carseats; I had all the latest parenting gear in the most fashionable colors (remember purple and teal, anyone?). I knew enough to fill a book. Heck, I did fill a book.

    And now, merely eight years since the birth of my youngest, fifteen from my first stroller purchase (a Perego Pliko, BTW) my knowledge is completely obsolete. By the time I am a grandparent I clearly will know absolutely nothing.

    Here’s how ancient I am (in parenting years, anyway):

    I bought my maternity clothes at Pea in a Pod and Motherwear. Most of them involved dorky sailor collars, ducks, or little bunnies. Even my best dress-up dress had little anchors on the buttons; not quite

sure about the relationship between pregnant women and boats, but there it was. Bloomingdales did not sell a maternity wardrobe in a box; the Gap did not have a maternity department.

    When I went shopping for baby gear, there was no such thing as a Baby Bjorn. We had Snugglies, and we thought we were amazingly innovative; yeah, the straps weren’t really padded and had a tendency to cut into our shoulders, and they were nearly impossible to get the baby in and out of, but they did come in a heck of a lot of cool colors and fabrics.

    There were no Exersaucers. Robeez infant shoes had yet to be designed. The Pump-In-Style was not in style.

    Coach did not make diaper bags. In fact, Land’s End had just shipped its very first diaper bag, and every mom immediately threw out the dorky baby-print bag she’d been shlepping around (mine had ducks on it; ducks again! I’m not big on ducks) and replaced it with a solid teal rip-stop nylon wonder.

    The idea that a stroller could cost $200 was outrageous; only Perego and McClaran went there.

    We didn’t obsessively examine milk labels, looking for rBST-free milk. Growth hormone was not being injected into cows.

    We did not have DVDs, we had videotape. We did not TiVo, but we knew that Barney came on at 3:30 pm every day.

    Cell phones were not used by ordinary mortals—they were unbelievably priced, the size and weight of a brick, and ran off car batteries. Moms hanging out in parks talked to each other.

    It’s not that we didn’t have cool gear. The Gerry backpacks were the hottest item on the street; we couldn’t wait until our babies could sit up solidly enough to use them. This was the original model, in blue cotton; you never could get the spit stains out (later models were nylon), but that didn’t matter. We special ordered organic Australian sheepskins, on which we put our babies to sleep, face down in the fur, warned by our pediatricians that if we dared to sleep them on their backs they could choke on their spit-up and die. We were thrilled with Earth’s Best, the brand-new organic babyfood on store shelves.

    And now we have moved on—to discussing MySpace and Facebook and how old your kid should be when you get him or her their own cell phone and should you subscribe to GPS tracking for said cell phone, and whether iPod earbuds or dangerous, and when will H&M open a store in Palo Alto. And in eight or ten years this hard-won knowledge will, again, be ancient history.