Sarah’s brother delivered the Exersaucer on Friday night while I was out selecting some movies to watch at Hollywood video. We had wanted to rent Witness but the Hollywood Video folks don’t have that movie on DVD and I don’t have the patience to set-up the VCR in order to watch a movie. I get the feeling that Hollywood video is a dying breed of store despite it’s being more convenient for Brookline residents looking for an errand to tack on top of parking their car to justify the silliness of driving away from their home after they get home. The main problem at Hollywood video that will cause them to ultimately fall out of favor with me is that they have no mechanism to acquire movies that I want to watch that they don’t yet carry. If I complain that they are missing Pretty in Pink, which they are, the friendly boho staff let me know that not enough elderly people like myself have asked to relive their John Hughes memories of youth and to please rent something more modern like Beauty Shop or Band Camp. What they need is to have a request box or web site to request movies that they don’t carry. If the movie was ever a top grossing movie in it’s time then they should add it to their collection. They don’t need to add every movie, just the ones that people near them want to watch. Since they are in Brookline they are likely to have a lot of people who are of movie renting age that grew-up watching the Breakfast Club and War Games.

Luckily they did have War Games since it is a great hacker pacifist movie that is rivaled only by Real Genius for the smart, funny, but dark vibe. War Games has such great lines like “Mr. Potato head, Mr. Potato head! Back doors are not a secret” and “Want to play chess? ….No, let’s play Global Thermo Nuclear War?”. The best quote is from the immortal wisdom of the WOPR computer, otherwise known as Joshua, after playing tic-tac-toe with itself and destroying the world in simulation a few thousand times -“Strange game. The only way to win is not to play at all.”

We were very worried in the 80s that the world would end in a sudden nuclear Armageddon. That was the theme of many an ‘80s movie. The politicians and the media always needs something to scare the population with. The current millennia has taken our fears a notch down from total destruction of all human life on earth to the more mundane war between the modern western world and the religious fundamentalist terrorists. It is less scary so we should be grateful that the problem we face seems intractable, more real, but less dangerous. The Turkish made this movie that was essentially an anti-American and anti-Semitic film where the bad guys were evil Americans and Jews. The movie even had real Hollywood folks in it like Gary Busey. On quick inspection of this situation it only makes me more aware of how often we fill the role of evil enemies with the Russians in the ‘80s and Arab terrorists looking to purchase high tech weapons in the nineties.

The assembly of the Exersaucer was the main objective of Saturday morning. I had assumed that it couldn’t be more complex than the Prima Poppa Rocker, Fisher Price Cradle Swing, or crib attached Aquarium. The Exersaucer is constructed of more parts than a scaled model of the USS Nimitz complete with flight deck aircraft from six fighting eras of planes. Assembly includes hooking springs on little projecting fingers and popping wheels into plastic casings. The assembly was going smooth as a World War II bomb factory when I reached the glitch on step 11 of 23 that I only had two of the necessary lime green rear brackets for the folding legs. We searched throughout our domicile and called the Matthew, who had delivered it the night before, but could not locate this green part.

So we moved on to other activities like purchasing a dozen bagels because we had a coupon for them at Brueggers. Sarah went to get her hair cut and Madeline and I went into intense gymnastic training. Madeline is now working on the roll over from her back to the stomach. On Saturday morning she managed to execute this complex, high difficulty maneuver three times in a row while I was watching and one time when I was looking away trying to nap on the floor. When we weren’t doing this nice family stuff I was watching “The Aristocrats”. I wouldn’t recommend this movie to most people who aren’t interested in documentaries about comedians or jokes. It did answer the question of some more esoteric acts, some of which were referred to in Deuce Bigelow European Gigolo, including the Rusty Trumbone, Strawberry Shortcake, and Dirty Sanchez.

Upon Sarah’s arrival back home we were ready to pick-up the Zooper stroller that I had located on craigslist. The initial attempt to procure this urban assault stroller had been bungled by Jeremy on Thursday when he went to pick it up and got spooked as he walked down Harvard Ave, believing that he had entered into the Brookline slums, and considered the possibility that the stroller was stolen merchandise that he was going to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for his role in the purchase.

But we did get the Zooper and learned about the many covers, shields, and armor that the Zooper comes equipped with. If the Combi is the smart car of strollers the Zooper is the H2. This monster of a stroller would dent a car and can be rode at high velocities as a jogging item. It could even climb mountains and has a special bracket for attaching a machine gun like an Uzi or Kalashnikov that can be fired by the baby inside in case of a dangerous situation. So with Madeline riding along fully equipped for urban warfare in the Zooper and the little defenseless Combi empty we returned to our home.

On Sunday we decided to get that damned Exersaucer part. Sarah wrote a nice complaint to the folks at Babies ‘R Us/Amazon.com and then called the Babies ‘R Us in Framingham. They offered to give us the part if we went into the store so we decided to take the drive out to Framingham with the hopes that we might manage to go walking in Hopkington State Park, around the lake at Wellesley, or just around the mall. At the mall we did manage to obtain the missing part, which is now in the back of my car with the 400 lb. Zooper stroller that really won’t fit properly in the back of the PT Cruiser until I clean out the garbage in the trunk. Our hopes of going for a walk were dashed when Madeline decided that she wasn’t happy when we tried to drive home.

On the way home we had a nice conversation about restaurants ripping people off on drinks. We had eaten at Joe’s American and weren’t pleased with having been charged for both a cranberry juice ($3.00) and a soda water ($1.95) to get a cranberry and soda. It wasn’t as bad as the time that Sarah, pregnant at the time, ordered two virgin Mojito’s at Eastern Standard in Kenmore square and was charged $10 per drink despite there having been no liquor in either drink. Did I mention she was pregnant at the time. Rat bastards!

Upon returning back from our adventure in urban sprawl, including a failed attempt to replace our floral Ralph Lauren sheet set with something more manly, Sarah checked her email. In the inbox was a message from the Amazon corporation letting her know that they were deeply sorry for the inconvenience and that they were sending a new Exersaucer to us in the mail. All we need to do is find all of the parts we have an put them back in the box and return it with a return label. Hopefully we can cancel that order before we start putting even more Exersaucers into motion throughout the country.

Anyways I am home with Madeline now. She is sleeping in the Combi, which I strolled her around in circles in to induce sleep. I knew she would be tired because she was awake from 12:30 PM until 8:30 AM today. Sarah looked particularly haggard and kept moaning something about going to sleep at the same time as Madeline tonight at 7:00 PM because she is so sleep deprived. I don’t tend to get as sleep deprived as Sarah does with Madeline. I do have a problem with the crying. On the average day before having a baby I would only experience crying if we watched a sad movie like Hair or Life is Beautiful but now I experience crying on an hourly basis. The cries rapidly escalate from being annoyed to the kind of miserable squeal you would expect to hear from a rabbit being attacked by a dog. So all of the crying is taking it’s toll on my generally cheery and positive outlook on life making me more depressed than I normally would be. But she is so cute when she is smiling and when she sleeps so it does make up for all the fuss the rest of the time.