BLOG: Would you like to buy a fancy pram or a small inner city apartment?

By BERN MORLEY

Wandering around a department store over the weekend I came across the baby section. Ever nostalgic for all things baby, I walked over to a pram and caressed it (an observer might even say that this looked a little creepy). That’s when I flipped the price tag over and audibly gasped. $1599. Huh? Let’s just say I was rather glad at that point that I didn’t have a heart condition.

When I recovered and pointed it out to my husband who was listening to me as only a male who has been dragged to a suburban megaplex against his will can, i.e. not at all, I wondered to myself if my children had missed out, you know, not being wheeled around in something that literally cost more than my first car.

I mean, seriously, is this the latest in parental pissing contests? Or was this kind of thing always going on and I just didn’t realise?

And get this, the one I saw in the shop was the last one and on a special! One that has no doubt been test-driven around the store a thousand times, rammed into topless mannequins and probably had had a toddler’s filthy fingers smeared into the undercarriage more than once.

My question to you though is, do you get more from say, the two thousand dollar pram, than the ones that I once purchased that were around the two hundred dollar mark? Did I receive roughly 10% of the product as a result? I have to know, does this hideously expensive contraption:

– Self Clean?

– Magically fold and unfold on voice command?

– Cure cracked nipples?

– Awkwardly launch itself at people who walk 4 abreast in shopping centres?

– Encourage People to HTFU at an ATM machine?

– Give the owner a foot rub?

– Make dinner?

– Wake up in the middle of the night, flop out a mechanical breast and feed the baby?

If the Pram could perform even one of the tasks above, I’d buy it. Unnecessary debt be damned. But something tells me the people buying these prams aren’t exactly worried about cash.

Ultimately though,  by the time the Pram has well and truly reached its use by date, it has been vomited on, shat in a thousand different ways to Sunday and ends up as a feral vessel for petrified fruit and unidentifiable smells.

Plus let’s face it, I’ll probably need that money for their therapy when they find out they were pushed around in the equivalent of a Datsun 180B instead of a Porsche when they were little.

So how about you? Are there features to these more expensive carriages I just don’t understand? Are they better or are they simply just a modern parenting status symbol?

Bern is a Gen X, child of the 80′s. Kept busy being a working mother of 3 children, one with Aspergers, renovating the original money pit and drinking too many coffees in the space of 24 hours.

One day she’ll remember to leave the meat out for tea but until then she writes beautiful and amusing posts on her blog which you can find here. You can also follow her on Twitter here.