Remember the James Taylor Song?  Showering people you love with love is awesome!  It feels great to be the showerer and the showeree.

What happens when the way you choose to shower people isn’t exactly what feels good to them though?

Baby showers are a tradition in our culture.  A time to gather together with people you love to celebrate the coming of your bundle of joy.  A time to lavish attention and gifts on the mother and to help make sure that the newborn will have everything needed to be well equipped for life.

All of this is good, and sweet, and loving.

My wife and I have chosen to live a simple lifestyle for ourselves.  We buy most of our clothes from second hand stores and we are very intentional about the things we buy, or more often, don’t buy.  This is a process that we started four years ago and it is still a work in progress.  It is work.  The decisions we make are not always easy and there is usually some emotional wrestling that goes on particularly between me and the latest electronic gadget (read Kindle).

Shortly after announcing our pregnancy people began asking us what we needed.  They wanted to help us and show us they loved us.  We really appreciated it.  We also became aware that the lifestyle we had chosen for ourselves and our family was on a direct collision course with the tradition of baby showers.  We envisioned a house full of electric baby wipe warmers, two sets of baby monitors and even a baby jacuzzi!  AHHHHHHHH!

Even scarier to us was the feeling that maybe we wanted all this stuff after all.  Maybe we needed it.  Maybe our baby would somehow feel deprived without it!

After much discussion between the two of us we decided that it would be far to easy to get off track about our lifestyle choices if we allowed the baby to be our excuse to consume.  Now, how would we tell our friends and family that we did not want the traditional shower or shower gifts?

We told them the truth.  The truth about our feelings, our lifestyle and out fears.  It has been amazing.

We have received a crib, a bassinet, a dresser, a changing table, a high chair, a swing, a bouncer and several booster seat thingies, all used, all free to both us and the givers of the gifts, all given to us in love.  We have so many onesies, sleep shirts and socks that we won’t need clothes for the better part of a year.  Most of these items were given to us one at a time and informally.  They are gifts that we will use with gratitude and then pass along to someone else who needs them when we are done.

We have received some new items; car seats, stroller and some gift cards to get last minute needs, but for the most part, we have gotten everything we need by re-using from friends.

Our family still wanted to give us a shower though.  We found out how much our family was willing to support and respect our decisions about gifting.  They gave us some blankets made by our young nieces, some clothes and a baby carrier that were duplicate gifts given to them during their baby showers (YEAH OPEN AND HONEST RE-GIFTING), and a blanket purchased in a consignment shop. It was wonderful to be able to celebrate our baby and the loving family we come from without giving in to the pressure to have a huge baby shower.  We felt so loved by them, not just for the gifts but for respecting our wishes, for paying attention to who we are trying to be as a family and for supporting us in those decisions.

If you are finding yourself in a similar predicament, we can honestly say, tell people what you want and do not be afraid to be different.  Suggest ways that they can shower you with love and still respect your lifestyle:

• Encourage regifting for your shower
• Suggest second hand and consignment shops
• Let them know that you would be happy to use their retired baby furniture

Keep it simple for you and your child.

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My last child was born in 1991.  My next child will be born in 2010.  That is a 19 year difference.  A lot can change in 19 years.  When my son was born, I am not even sure there was a Babies – R – Us, but if there was I do not remember it being the monument to over-consumption it seems to be today.

We went there to look at strollers recently.  19 years ago there wasn’t much of a selection.  There were carriages, big old clunky strollers and umbrella strollers.  That was about it.  I knew everything had changed the moment we stepped into the stroller section and saw Travel Systems, Joggers, Snap and Go, Double and even Triple Strollers!  There were models made by Jeep, Fisher Price and Graco with designs by everyone from Disney to Eddie Bauer!  We even saw a few by Evenflo.  Evenflo?  Don’t they make baby bottles?  How do you possibly retool the assembly line to go from nipples to strollers?

We were feeling a bit overwhelmed so we asked a sales person for some help.  She was kind enough to take us over to the Maclaren strollers.  One of the selling points of this $500.00 stroller was that it was the only stroller we would ever need.  It would carry our baby from newborn all the way up to the age of 7!  She said that with all seriousness and, I assume, expected us to be impressed.  If I am still pushing my child in a stroller at the age of 7, I will not want a new stroller, I will want a new child.  I can’t imagine helping our child learn to walk and then denying him or her EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO DO SO!  If anyone is getting pushed in a stroller when my child is 7, it will be me and the child will be pushing it’s 50 year old father around.

We left the store.

Apparently we were going to have to assess what we were really going to need vs. what the “popular wisdom” was going to try to sell us.  My wife and I have dedicated a lot of energy and thought into living intentionally as far as what we consume and what we own.  We try to live as simply as possible.  Part of this is economic, as we are not rich, but part of this is spiritual for us.  How can we live in ways that provide the most benefit to the planet and to other human beings?  That is a question we wrestle with in our food, clothing and lifestyle choices on a daily basis.  It looked to us, from our visit to Consumption Central, that equipping the child with everything it would “need” was going to run counter to our lifestyle choice of living simply.

Look at this item we found in the section dedicated to our child’s safety.  It is a movement monitor.  That’s right, for the low price of $139.99, this handy device will alert you electronically if your precious little baby stops moving in it’s sleep for more than 20 seconds.  Having raised a newborn before, I remember longing for those 20 second stretches so i could get some sleep of my own.  Now they want to sell me a monitor so that when I can finally drift off to sleep I am awakened to go and make sure the baby is still sleeping.  Just brilliant.  This item is out of stock on line because it is so popular!  Not only are they trying to steal my money, they are stealing my sense of security and peace and replacing it with fear and worry.  BABIES SLEEP!  BABIES SURVIVE SLEEPING QUITE OFTEN.  Please do not get us this as a gift.

Here is our list of what we absolutely, positively, must have, can not do without for our new baby.

Boobs for eating, a car seat for transporting and diapers for everything else.

Boobs we got.

Our parents will be getting us the car seat.

Please send diapers.

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My Son was born in a hospital and I am thankful for that.  His cord was caught up in the fold of his arm so each contraction reduced his blood supply and heart rate.  A cesarean was necessary after 7 hours of labor but the delivery was successful.  We are not anti-hospital, per se.  The tools and skills available to us are miraculous and can be life saving.

What we were longing for though, was a more personalized and human experience.  We wanted an opportunity to allow nature to do what it is designed for and has been doing relatively successfully for thousands of years.

We did some research, checked with some others we know who had gone the route of midwifery and made a decision.  No OB/GYN, no fetal heart monitor, no stirrups.

We were really interested in a home birth to keep it as simple as possible.  We were not surprised to find that insurance and liability have made it very difficult to find a midwife that will still make house calls.  We chose to go to the Birth Center which is about 20 minutes from our house.

Being pregnant at the “advanced maternal age” of 38 definitely comes with some concerns.  Being in relatively good health and physical condition, as well as taking a regimen of prenatal vitamins before conception, helped us to minimize any fear of those increased risks.  We decided to trust that the body knows what it is doing and we waived all but the first ultrasound for confirmation of gestational age.  No amnio, no blood work-ups, no confirmation of gender…

We were not prepared for the ripples of concern that this would send through many of those in our close circles.  Statements like “why would you want to give birth without medication?”, “OK, we’ll see how far into labor you get before you are screaming for drugs” and our favorite, “A woman of your age needs to be closely monitored and tested to make sure nothing is wrong with the fetus!”. Having decided that we would carry and deliver the baby no matter what, there seemed to be no sense for us in intrusive testing and the increased stress that it would bring.  We simply wanted to go through this miraculous and glorious event as simply as we were created to.

How is it that something so natural has become so complicated?

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“Really?” I thought to myself as my wife sat on the bed next to me holding a positive pregnancy test in her hand.  After taking three or four of those tests in the past year I was beginning to think that the double line they showed on the package was a myth.

Here we were though, me at 42 and my wife at the “advanced maternal age” of 38, sitting together on a Sunday morning staring at our future on a stick.

Among the many thoughts I remember having that morning joy and thankfulness were probably the most prevalent.  Terror, shock and confusion were well represented but joy and thankfulness trumped them all.

This would be my wife’s first child.  I have a son who was 18 and would be half way through his first semester at college when his brother or sister was born.  I would qualify for a discounted fare on the bus with my AARP card before this new life went to the Senior Prom.  We had been told about the added risks of pregnancy and child birth at “our age”.  Retirement plans would now include regular visits to this child’s college campus or first apartment.  Our Monday “date days” were 9 short months away from disappearing from our calendars, yet we were filled with joy.

We had wanted, prayed for, worked at, and given up hope on ever conceiving this child.  We had desperately longed to bring a new life into the world as a way of expressing gratitude and returning some of the blessings the Universe had given us.  Prayers get answered, hope gets rewarded, life advances.

Let the adventure begin!

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