This week, chez Uberimma

It has not been a good week for strollers.

We used to have two. The first was a Graco stroller that I bought a month or two after Barak was born, when I had no idea what I would really need--it's the kind that comes with a car seat that you can snap in. It's unmaneuverable in snow, as I discovered with the first flake, so last December I bought a second one--a big, expensive (in my book--you can easily spend four or five hundred bucks on these things if you are so inclined) jogging stroller that I got from LL Bean, with a weather canopy inside the sunshade that you can zip out and clip on for when it rains or is really cold and windy. We don't have a car, so my stroller really is the car--I shop with it, take Barak everywhere in it, etc. We kept both strollers in the bottom of the inside stairwell in our old apartment, and have been keeping them at the bottom of the outdoor back stairs here. I didn't lock them--who's going to steal my stroller out of my yard?

Well...

Last Saturday, I was about to take Barak to an aufruf (the event marking the last Shabbos before a bridegroom's wedding) and as I carried him (carefully) down the back stairs, it took me several seconds to realize that the jogging stroller was gone. I looked around the yard, and then the alley, and it was pretty clear what had happened--it had gotten stolen during the night. You often see trucks driving through the alleys where I live, salvaging things from the garbage bins, and I guess someone got a little overeager. So, goodbye less-than-a-year-old jogger, goodbye $185. I have to buy a new one--it isn't at all negotiable, since the remaining stroller becomes useless the moment it snows.

But at least I still had one stroller.

Until Friday. When I went to the bakery with Barak to buy challah for shabbos, gave him half a roll, and tucked the other half into the canopy for later. And forgot about it. But the evil killer mutant squirrels who live in our yard reminded me, by chewing all the way through the back of the stroller to get to it. The stroller is still usable, in a pinch, but it looks so awful I'm embarassed to be out with it, and my standards for such things are not particularly high. Besides, it doesn't exactly offer much in the way of sun protection.

Sigh.

B"H I can afford to buy another stroller, though this time I got the least expensive jogger I could find. It should come in the mail later this week. The mangled stroller will go in the basement, for shopping--the jogger doesn't have much of a basket. And tomorrow, I'm taking Barak to Target to buy a bike lock.

Favorite word this week, by the way, is "up." It means both "up" and "down," or maybe both "I want to go up" and "I'm tired of being up," as the situation warrants. Other relatively new words include "hot," "bubble," and "uh-oh," and the sign for "more" has resurfaced after an absence of a month or so. New phrase: "no way!" I guess I say that one a lot. "No way," and "oh boy," are both big these days. Fun activity today was sitting in the glider rocker, looking cute, and playing with Abba's juggling equipment in the living room. He's started stacking the rings on his stacking-rings-on-a-stick toy (you know what I'm talking about, you probably had one) though not yet in the right order. He is starting to get the nesting cups right, though, and occasionally stacks blocks. And he will climb on anything. I'm very glad we got the bookshelves bolted to the walls.