Update: Bugaboo Meets Old Navy

Many moons ago (okay, it was December, but it feels like another life time) I wrote about wheeling the Bugaboo into Old Navy. On Easter Sunday I did just that, although it was sort of by accident. I was actually en route to Target (for some reason wheeling the Bug into Target doesn't seem as odd as wheeling it into Old Navy) to buy a picnic blanket so we can begin introducing Milo to the wonders of the outdoors, when I realized it was Easter Sunday and Target would be closed. But Old Navy would be open.

I knew this bizarre piece of trivia because I had been en route to Target last Easter Sunday. It was a grey, wet day, and that I dragged myself and my morning sickness the 30 or so blocks down Atlantic Avenue for the sole purpose of buying maternity pants at Target. When I discovered the store was closed I had to bite my lip to keep from collapsing into a sobbing, sticky heap. Thankfully, Old Navy is across the street, and I made my way there and slid on a pair of maternity jeans that I would then proceed to live in for the next six or so months, until I got too enormous to fit both my ass and my belly into them, at which point I simply ceased leaving the house since I didn't have any pants.

So here we were, a year later, only now Milo was on the outside and had, like, arms and stuff. I thought back on how sick I was, on how annoyed I felt at the fact that I had already outgrown regular pants at only 10 weeks into my pregnancy. And then I looked at Milo, at this solid chunk of kid who, at five months, already weighs as much as some one-year-olds, and the intensity of the nausea and the sheer enormity of my belly made sense. Cause = Milo. Effect = huge, uncomfortable pregnancy. After he was born I craned my neck to see him squirming on the table the nurses were examining him on, and I remember thinking that he didn't look at all like a newborn. He looked like a weight lifter. He had biceps.

In any event, Milo and the Bug and I visited Old Navy and bought nothing, and then we went home. It turns out that the oddest part about owning a Bugaboo is not feeling silly wheeling it into Old Navy. The oddest part is that other Bugaboo owners like to stop you on the street and ask questions. On my way home from Old Navy some guy in a suit tapped me on the shoulder at a street light, pointed at my diaper bag, which was hanging off the handlebars, and asked "Is that a Bug attachment?", by which he really meant, "I have a ridiculously expensive stroller too!".

The only people who stop me to ask about the Bug are Bug owners themselves. Except for one lady who owned a Stokke, which is the other ridiculously expensive stroller on the market. She seemed to want to compare ridiculously expensive strollers. Other people ask when we switched from the bassinet attachment to the seat attachment, complain about the stroller's girth in the same way you might complain about how big your yacht is, or just shoot you a knowing smile and a wink like, hey, we're rich too!

Even our nanny (who, by the way, when I first asked her to take Milo out for a walk, responded by saying "Ooh! I get to use the Bugaboo!") reported back to me that she gets stopped on the street by other Bug owners. Once she was in the park and some woman with a Bug came running over to her, saying "I never see Bugs on this side of the park!". [Translation: "The real estate agent told me this neighborhood was gentrifying, but now I'm not so sure."]

I have to say that having received the Bug as a gift is the best of all possible worlds. I get to push this fabulous stroller around town (and let me just say that it is, as strollers go, fucking awesome) while simultaneously thinking poorly of people who own Bugaboos.