Carrying a heavy load

Call it a weak moment. Or maybe it was just sheer desperation. After spending most of Saturday morning and the early afternoon with baby Dimitri, I was ready to move around and get things done. Thomai and the girls were out and about and it was just the men of the family holding down the proverbial fort. Dimitri had hit his limit for sitting around and he was letting me know it, too. Going outside wasn’t an option because it was pouring rain and we’d already watched way too much television. Let’s face it: you can only watch so many of those Investigation Discovery shows back to back before you start to wonder which one of your neighbors is going to hire a hit man to stab you with a fondue fork so they can inherit your grandfather’s secret gold mine. (Really, that’s how weird it gets, folks.) Anyway, at some point in the day I got the bright idea to dig out the baby carrier that we bought before Dimitri was born. I figured that since the little guy absolutely wouldn’t tolerate another moment on his back or in his baby swing, maybe he’d enjoy being carried around the house while I tried to make a dent in my laundry list of chores...which ironically included doing some laundry.

After an extensive search around the house, I found our Infantino Swift Baby Carrier. I did not, however, find the instruction booklet that came with it. But I have a master's degree, so I figured I could safely tackle this one without much help. After I got all the straps, Velcro and clips straightened out, I loaded my squirming, 12-pound sack of potatoes into it and, believe it or not, he was quite content with the whole situation. The carrier can be worn either on the front or the back. I picked the front, particularly because Dimitri has been spitting up a lot lately and I wanted fair warning just in case he blew up like some miniature geyser that only shoots lukewarm cottage cheese.

Dimitri loves being carried around and seeing everything there is to see, so I was already feeling like this was a great arrangement. In fact, it was a nice 20 to 25 minutes we had with this thing and, while the conventional wisdom might have held that it was my back that would bear the brunt of the strain, I didn't experience a lot of discomfort from my shoulders to my caboose. There were limits to what we could achieve as a team, though. My efforts at packaging up some books to send out in the mail reminded me just how observant and curious Dimitri is, as he was very interested in the shiny (and sharp) scissors I was using to cut up bubble wrap. So, I had to keep my work at a pretty fair distance to ensure that his fingers still numbered into the double-digits. Picking up stuff, doing a few dishes and all that went just fine, too. But the big problem at my end was that both of my arms started going numb after just a few minutes. The left arm got it much worse than the right and I suspect that has something to do with the placement of the straps. By the time I felt like I’d done enough chores to earn a rest, Dimitri seemed ready to call it quits, too. The numbness in my arms turned to pain for a little while but by early evening, I was feeling okay.

It was definitely time well spent but there’s obviously something I’m missing with how to configure the thing. With a little more trial and error—or maybe just with the help of the freakin’ instructions— this carrier is something that could come in very handy again in the near future. I used the carrier again today with much better results. We cleared out the dishwasher and I fried up some salt pork for lunch, being careful to keep Dimitri at an angle (and a distance) from the stove when we’d flip it. One of the keys to using this and avoiding discomfort is providing a little extra support for Dimitri with alternating hands. I can still get a lot done because I am not completely using the strength of one arm to carry him. All things considered, I think this contraption is a keeper and if I was to “officially” rate this thing, I’d give it three out of four seasons.

Relax, he’s a professional...

My father-in-law retired in 2003 after over 40 years as an autoworker. Considering all those years spent working with his hands at the truck factory—as well as his early upbringing in a rural village in Greece, his experiences in building his first family home in Fort Wayne, Indiana and decades of being the family’s “go-to guy” for every kind of repair job imaginable—it was a tough adjustment for him to have so much time on his hands. Not one for reading books or watching television, he turned his attention to stuff around the house and in the yard, “repairing” things and “improving them”...whether they needed it or not. Over time, his abilities have slipped a little and things don’t always turn out quite the way he expects. Sometimes the results are funny; other times...well, not so much. Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say this—speaking from personal experience, mind you: When someone reaches a certain age, the mere suggestion of that person using a chainsaw, a power drill or even a tire compressor should send the entire family into DEFCON 1.

My father-in-law has slowed down quite a bit in the past few months, mostly because of all the changes we’ve been through but also because it’s pretty unpleasant outside right now with the early onset of winter weather here in Ohio. Still, he finds the time and interest to tinker with all sorts of things even if the work it’s on a much smaller scale these days. Below is a recent picture of his “workbench” which also doubles as the living room coffee table. I’m not sure what exactly he was doing with all these things on this particular day (and I’m not sure he knew, either), but whatever he was doing took the better part of the day, no power tools were involved, and nobody had to go to the emergency room. So it was basically time well-spent, all things considered.

A formula…for baby formula

I’m sure this will come across as ungrateful and that’s certainly not my intent. I mean, I am very thankful that I left baby Dimitri’s three-month visit to the pediatrician with five free 8 oz. cans of Enfamil A.R. Our doctor seems to think that this will curtail some problems Dimitri is experiencing with acid reflux. Anyway, the street value on this “powder” is somewhere between $50 and $60 (about $1.30 to $1.80 per oz.), depending on your preferred retailer and it’s not the first time we’ve received free samples of formula. In fact, I am relatively certain that since Dimitri’s birth in late August, we’ve actually received just as much free formula as what we’ve purchased at the store. We’ve even received entire cases of powder formula on more than one occasion. And many sample containers include one or two coupons that offer discounts on future purchases of the same product.  And at that, we have rarely paid full price for the stuff between all the manufacturer’s coupons and other discounts we’ve acquired. We were even getting samples and coupons through the mail months before we even knew whether this kid was a “he” or a “she”! All this begs the question: If the producers and distributors of baby formula can afford such widespread and relatively deep discounts, why is baby formula so expensive in the first place?

I will be the first to admit that I’m no expert when it comes to mathematics or marketing but some points are fairly obvious. For example, I use the phrase “relatively deep discounts” to reflect that the majority of coupons we receive lop between $3 and $5 off a $17.00 can of formula. So those who sell the product are willing to pass up around 18% to 29% of the retail price on a certain percentage of sales. That’s a noteworthy—and welcome—savings for many folks, especially for those who make the annual median wage ($26,364) or less.¹  Consider also the sheer volume of samples that manufacturers give away to hospitals, doctors’ offices and directly to consumers. I’ve seen this first hand. No doubt the freebies aren’t considered actual “product” by the manufacturers themselves. It’s a safe bet that the samples (most of which are marked “Not for Retail Sale”) are regarded as advertising expenses rather than actual stock, so companies lose nothing from their bottom line by giving away so much of what they produce. To be sure, they probably sell a lot more than what they give away. But do they sell so much because they give away so much? Probably not. I don’t know how competitive the baby formula market is these days but even with a declining birth rate in the United States, people are still having babies and those babies still need to eat. And most of them, at some point, will need some kind of baby formula either as their primary diet or as a supplement. But if the companies who produce formula still turn a hefty profit at the end of the day, they are ultimately validating the assertion of supply-side economics which holds that consumption and demand are secondary consequences of a successful capitalist enterprise.²  (I’m not even going to get into the shelf life of formula and the implications of overproduction when viewed from the supply-side perspective. Perhaps that’s a discussion for another day.)

It’s fairly clear that, generally speaking, baby formula is ridiculously overpriced. Although it’s a necessity with regard to the health and well-being of infants, as a commodity baby formula is neither scarce nor expensive and it’s not necessarily difficult to produce, either. The plethora of discount offers, coupons and free samples that producers offer to consumers further exposes the fact that the “market” itself is almost completely artificial. Rosa Luxemburg nicely summed up this kind of phenomenon in her unfinished work What is Economics?:

Price fluctuations are like secret movements directed by an invisible agency behind the back of society… This movement is observed as atmospheric pressure read on a barometer, or temperature on a thermometer. And yet commodity prices and their movements manifestly are human affairs and not black magic. No one but man himself—with his own hands—produces these commodities and determines their prices, except that, here again, something flows from his actions which he does not intend or desire; here again, need, object, and result of the economic activity of man have come into jarring contradiction.

Don’t get me wrong here; getting free baby formula is nice. Now more than ever, I enjoy having a little extra cash in my wallet whenever possible. Hell, I’d even be happy to publicly endorse Enfamil A.R. if it keeps my baby boy’s reflux in check. I’d work cheaply, too; they could just pay me with free formula! But at the end of the day, I’d be happiest if the folks who produce the stuff could just do away with all the smoke and mirrors and simply offer their products at a consistent, reasonable price that is both indicative of the actual cost of production (plus labor) and affordable to all consumers. I am certain this is possible.

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1. “U.S. Median Annual Wage Falls To $26,364 As Pessimism Reaches 10-Year High” Huffington Post
2. “Supply-side economics” Wikipedia