National Geographic Explorer: Philly Metro Edition

You ever watch those nature shows where they pump monkeys full of some experimental drug and test their cognitive skills? Usually they’ll have some gizmo with shapes, and if the monkey gets the puzzle right, he gets a banana or something. Given my love for monkeys and their monkeyshines, I considered this to be the perfect analogy for what Linda and I went through trying to pick out the right stroller for Baby G.

Our initial expedition took us to Norman’s Juvenile Furniture, deep in the heart of the Irish section of South Philly. As our scents reek of the Italian section (a mixture of ‘gravy’ [marinara sauce] and gabagool), the natives kept a close eye on our activity, on the chance that we wanted to muscle in on their local watering hole. Think Meerkat Manor, but with 75% more random daytime drunkenness.

Norman’s can best be described as the kind of place that was a neighborhood grocery until some enterprising local, presumably Norman, decided to start a new career by hijacking a Babies R Us delivery truck. The place was packed to the gills with nearly every kind of baby accoutrement that you could dream of. There was almost no room in the place to walk. The space that wasn’t taken up by product was taken up by female shoppers in various stages of pregnancy, herding their screaming broods through vicious arm yanks and high pitched shrieking. The entire scene was deeply unsettling.

The stroller aisle looked like a used car lot. There were strollers on the shelves, strollers in boxes, strollers hanging from the ceiling, and the newest models spit-polished and lined up front-to-back along the length of the aisle. After we kicked a few tires, a salesman, smelling rubes, came to join us. He looked for all the world like a cross between Paulie Walnuts and Al Bundy. You could just feel the self loathing pouring off of this poor soul as he forced the description of each stroller from between his tightly drawn lips. I almost asked if he was trying to pass a kidney stone. Needless to say, the search was somewhat less than fruitful.

As were leaving Norman’s, some of the famous ‘local color’ was on display. Two shirtless, drunken morons stood toe-to-toe in the middle of the street, yelling at each other over some perceived slight the one’s “junkie brother” had directed at the other. As a fan of monkeys beating their chests and hurling poop at one another, I was fascinated by this display and stopped to see if any action was going to take place. Unfortunately, Linda wanted no part of this and made me move along. I tried to explain to her that this was the Irish neighborhood, where they settled things with their fists and had a drink together afterwards, but she was having none of it. Sigh…guess I’ll just have to watch UFC.

A few weeks later, we decided to go to the Babies R Us in Beautiful South Jersey® to try out more strollers. This time, we were the monkeys.

Crossing the threshold into Babies R Us for the first time is like entering another dimension. The normal laws of common sense, physics and economics do not apply, and there is much flailing about and resignation to one’s fate as both ‘mature’ (overly so) and permanently indebted to large credit card companies based in Wilmington, DE. No escape.

We went over to the well-kept stroller aisle and started messing around with these monstrosities. If you've never fooled around with the new generation of strollers, I suggest you take out a student loan and get a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. They are that complicated. What bugged me most about them is that they are presented as “easy to use” by the prominent display of giant red buttons and levers. Not so. These things are Rube Goldberg contraptions that are impossible to fold without the help of a professional trained in the art of origami on a mountaintop in Tibet for seven years. Both of us have gone to graduate school, and yet we looked like monkeys with a printing press trying to fold the stupid things. We looked so foolish that I secretly suspected we were on Candid Camera or Punk’d. Finally we relented to expediency, and a wise Babies R Us ninja descended from the rafters to teach us the Way of the Peg Perego.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that the baby registries are up and ready to go (top right.) Feel free to donate to a worthy cause: Baby G! Donations may not be tax deductible, but Baby G will certainly thank you when his/her bottom is kept from rashing up through the magic of Boudreaux’s Butt Paste.