The Lamberts rule! (and we are spazzes.)

We just got back from a pleasant afternoon in Hoboken, hanging out with the world's cutest 1-year-old (see photo, right), and returned laden down with an incredible amount of baby stuff. Souffle and Dave gave us a stroller, a breast pump, a wee tent, a bunch of baby books, a car seat insert (with extra padding for an infant), baby clothes (including a Ramones t-shirt!), and god only knows what else. And this is the second time they've showered us with infant supplies!

But best of all, Souffle put together this incredible "Post-Natal Survival Kit":


I am dumbfounded by the amount of thoroughness and detail that she put into it ... basically, it's Everything You Didn't Know You Needed For The First Few Weeks Of Your Baby's Life, with each product carefully selected for maximum usefulness and superiority to competing products. I think she should get out of the web-design biz and just market these kits!

For less spastic people, getting this loot home might have been easy. We, however, got onto the wrong train and ended up at the Christopher Street PATH station, a narrow, claustrophobia-inducing tube not equipped with an elevator to the street -- which presented a problem, because we had all of the Lamberts' baby stuff piled into the stroller and draped about our persons. For some reason (perhaps because I was excessively annoyed by the lack of an elevator, or perhaps because we were both on sugar highs from having shared a brownie sundae at the Frozen Monkey), the situation took on an air of crisis. At one memorable point, Greta was yelling at me to just lift the damn stroller over the exit turnstile instead of trying to fold it up, when a box tumbled out of the stroller, rolling towards the edge of the platform while I chased after it, at the very moment that a train was entering the station on that track. "Don't follow it onto the tracks!!" Greta shouted.

I managed to retrieve the box before it put my life in danger and lift the stroller over the turnstile, but there was no way that the two of us -- one of us very pregnant -- were going to be able to wrestle all of this stuff up the three flights of stairs to the street. Fortunately, at that very moment, a nice couple was laboriously carrying their own stroller down the stairs. The husband took pity on us and offered to help us carry our packages up to the street. "This station is ridiculous!" he said as we climbed up into the crisp December evening air. We thanked him profusely and caught a cab the rest of the way home.

We will have to work on our crisis management skills if we're going to deal with parenthood ...

Thanks again, Souffle and Dave!

PS: I should note that the couple who helped us at Christopher Street were clearly also stressing: as the husband prepared to help us with our packages, he motioned towards the turnstiles and said to his wife, "Just go on through, honey!", to which she replied (in a kidding-on-the-square tone), "Don't tell me what to do!"