What is it about the French and baby consumer products? Why do people think that they (the French, not the babies) know so much about what they’re doing? Why were my wife and I told that Sophie the Giraffe (a squeaky toy, a teething toy, from France) was a “can’t live without”? Why were we told that we would regret it if we didn’t have Sophie, not just in the nursery, but in the delivery room? Is this just a shameless marketing gimmick to which susceptible parents fall prey and then go on to encourage other susceptible parents to fall prey and then so forth and so on until the gambit has run its course? And why are new parents so prone to fall for these ploys? Why do we like the weirdo Deglingos stuffed animals (designed in France)? Is it because they are weirdoes or because they are French? Or is it in spite of the fact that they are weirdoes and/or French? If a child refuses to teethe on Sophie the Giraffe, does that mean she’s xenophobic? And why did this Recent Paterfamilias see a copy of Walter the Farting Dog in translation, in French (Walter le Chien qui Pète), in a kids’ store window last week, in a non-French speaking country? Shouldn’t Walter the Farting Dog, in America, in translation, be in Spanish? Or Chinese? Why is it that this Recent Paterfamilias has found a “European Baby Bathing Pod” (see: plastic bucket) to be the most effective and convenient way in which to bathe his child? Why is it that the only thing this Recent Paterfamilias has found to successfully clear his daughter’s clogged nasal cavities is a Swedish “Snot Sucker”? And why does no one ask for a description as to how this tool works? Is it because the description itself is nearly as nauseating as the operation of the device? And why is this Recent Paterfamilias so comfortable discussing how he orally sucks the snot, through a filtered tube, from the nose of his beloved offspring? And on a side note: are the Swedes comparable to the French when it comes to child-specific consumer products? Are Swedish highchairs superior to French ones? Or Finnish ones? Or Dutch ones? Do the English or the Spanish or the Latvians even make highchairs? Why is it that European Teddy bears (see: our 26th President and the obvious malcolloquialisms) seem so chic and all our bears just seem so…well…bearish? Why do German wooden toys come across as more “wholesome” than American wooden toys? Are their trees more wholesome than ours? And why has the Recent Paterfamilias fallen for all this? Is it Francophilia? Anglophilia? Swede-o-philia? Is it marketing? Sleep deprivation? Sheer stupidity? Is the Recent Paterfamilias questioning his purchases too much? Or is the European Bathing Pod (see: plastic bucket) actually superior to American Bathing Buckets, if American Bathing Buckets did, indeed, exist? And why are there no American Bathing Buckets? Can’t somebody in a Midwest warehouse somewhere spare a five-gallon bucket so that his neighbor might effectively give his child a complete and proper scrubbing-down? What is the country coming to when we can’t even share our empty buckets? Will this eventually make us industrially inferior to the Europeans? And why do They have a corner market on buckets? Doesn’t a bucket seem like it would be a universal item? And why do all these questions come up at the precise moment when a child is wailing in the next room? Is it sleep deprivation? Coincidence? Marketing? Is it some sort of global conspiracy? And why can’t a person just buy what he wants without having to question it so much? If his baby likes it, and if it works, and if it clears her nostrils, then who the hell cares?
Xenophobic babies? Over giraffe-shaped teethers? Just because they’re make in France? Really?
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