It's Hard Work Being a Future Dad

My crib has two right sides.

Explanation: It's official - when I say "my crib" I no longer mean my house. I mean the crib we now have for our daughter.

We were pleasantly surprised when the store called us to say that our crib had arrived this weekend while a relative with a large vehicle was conveniently in town. The crib came in a very large (but not terribly heavy) box which my wife and I managed to get up our stairs. The "team lift" image on the box does not take her pregnant belly into account. Of course, I think they omitted the pregnant belly for legal reasons. I should emphasize that the crib box was not terribly heavy and that my wife was never in any danger at any time. Actually, scratch that. I'm just going to say that a large Scandinavian strongman was in town and he helped me get the crib up the steps. That'll keep the lawyers off my back.

After setting aside a good chunk of time for assembly, I got cracking. Since the crib was made in Vietnam for a Taiwanese company (run "locally" in Canada) it was extremely well packed. I spent a solid half hour just getting the box and packing out of the way. Little bits of styrofoam were all over the place, thanks to the miracle of static electricity. Luckily, I have the world's greatest vaccuum, which took care of the styrofoam in no time.

Once all the pieces were out, I surveyed my instructions. Step 1: attach the right side of the crib to the back of the crib. The back was easy to find, although it took me some time to figure out which side was the top and which was the inside. Next I grabbed the right side of the crib and loosely connected them.

Step 2: attach the left side of the crib to the back of the crib. At this point, I noticed a problem. My crib came with two right sides. This stunk, as I was all sorts of excited about finishing up the crib on Sunday. I pondered numerous ways in which I could alter the construction to make it work, but the only way I could pull it off was to add three or four dimensions to the blueprints to make the crib Escher-like. I concluded that calling customer service might be a better move. I called them up this morning and we should have the new part within a week.

On the bright side, one of the assembly parts for the crib is called a "rubber bumper." Since we have two and they go on a crib, I believe these technically are "rubber baby bumpers." I always wondered what rubber baby bumpers looked like. Now I know.