Sunday [WARNING] I [HAZARD] put together [DANGER] a crib
On Sunday shortly after Robin finished the supports for my bed, I set about putting together the crib (well, the co-sleeper) in the tiny but just-adequate space that I had left for it (I used cut out bits of graph paper to figure out, literally, the only configuration in my room that would work).
It was relatively simple, really, and yet I almost wish we'd hung on to the print-out of instructions from the Web my parents had given us at the baby shower by way of saying that the co-sleeper was being mailed to us. See, the hardest part of following the official instructions was finding the actual steps you were supposed to do, which appeared practically as fine print in between the huge bold warnings of suffocation and killing your child if you breathed the wrong way while adjusting the liner snaps.
Which isn't to say I don't support product safety, or that I didn't read the page of safety concerns in the front of the booklet, or that I think my kid will be invincible from all danger. I support Consumers Union and believe there is an important place for in our courts for real malpractice and negligance cases, which do happen.
But neither do I trust liability insurance companies. Warnings like this are all about CYA, not safety, and come from the same place that has shut down school grounds to their own kids outside of school hours and innumerable other over-reactive restrictions (Bush and his justice department, much as they inveigh against liability lawyers, must secretly be green with envy at how much they manage to control the details of our lives.)
Anyhow, I get the sense (though I haven't in my first quick search found any backup for this) that crib prices might well be like ladders, with 50 percent of what you pay going to the makers' insurance premiums.
Now I'm going to look for a thread-ripper, so I can remove the huge warning label on the crib itself that would otherwise be staring me in the face every time I woke up to nurse the baby. It'll be a bit of a pain to get off, but the other option is draping a potential suffocation hazard over it.