End of an Era

Today's trash day was certainly bittersweet, as we threw away our exersaucer, bumbo, and baby bathtub.  You may think we should have donated all of them, but you would be wrong.  They have all served very faithfully, and they are past the point anyone else would ever want them!

The exersaucer was given to us by our friends Ruth and Chip after they adopted their daughter (who is Anna's age) from China.  So Grace was the first of our babies to enjoy this exersaucer, which was MUCH jazzier than our old one, which we kept down in the basement.  The little toys were much more interesting, and they played music!  But now, having had 6 babies bounce around in it (5 of ours, plus Lily), it has seen better days.  The toys don't stay in (and some don't work anymore), the seat part is falling apart . . . it is ready for a nice retirement.

The bumbo was given to us by my brother and sister-in-law, Dan and Melinda, also when Grace was born.  Somehow her birth brought about a significant upgrading of our old baby equipment!  That has been one of the most useful things we had for babies, and I was so thankful they gave it to us, because I'm sure I wouldn't have bothered to buy one myself!  (The thing about having more and more kids is that with each one, you know the probability of them being the last one is getting higher and higher, and who wants to buy new stuff after 5 . . .6 . . . 7 . . .8 . . .9 . . .kids . . . so the later kids are stuck with older and rattier stuff--except when you have kind and generous friends and family, LOL.)

The bathtub should receive some sort of meritorious service award indeed.  We bought this tub back when we had Nathan, so it has held all 10 kids.  Several kids back the drain plug started leaking.  I attempted to fix that with duct tape, which didn't work, so Bob ended up glopping a ton of Shoo Goo around the plug.  That stopped the leak, although we could no longer drain it out the bottom.  But it went on to bathe the rest of the kids, so that was a small price to pay.  The yellow padding started to come off, so I super-glued that and never had any more problems with it.  I have always loved that you could fold this tub up for storage.  That is probably why we were able to keep it so long!  I would have been hard-pressed to move and store one that didn't fold up all these years!

So it was a bit hard to see these things go, after all these years, but I can certainly say we got as much use as possible out of them all!  And I am very happy to not have to store that exersaucer in the basement storage room anymore!