The end of an era

Before we went to China, we bought an Ergo baby carrier for our soon-to-be baby.  According to many adoptive parents, it's a great tool for attaching to your child because it lets you spend lots of time holding them against your body, re-creating that bonding opportunity that mothers naturally have with their newborns when they feed and rock and carry them.  It's also a whole lot easier to maneuver than a stroller, especially on crowded sidewalks and public transportation!

Esther got her first taste of the carrier early on in our lives together.  She had fallen asleep in my arms in the van on the way from our Civil Affairs appointment (where we met her) to our hotel.  I still cherish the memory of that sweet, sleeping baby in my arms, but boy, by the time we finished checking into our hotel and made it up to our room, I felt like my arms were about to fall off!  With great relief, I laid her gently down on our bed--and she woke up.  And wailed.  In no uncertain terms, she let us know that she was furious and she was not going to go back to sleep!  I didn't think my arms could take much more, so I hauled out the brand new carrier, wrestled it on (with Tim's help!), and plopped her into it.  Once I started walking with her, she calmed quickly, and then fell back asleep.  I was afraid to put her down again, so this is how she took her first nap with us:

Later in the day when she was a little fussy, I put her back in the carrier and went for a walk, and she calmed right down.  After that, she pretty much lived in the carrier whenever we were out in public.  It was incredibly convenient, it was a place where she felt safe, and it let us stay in tune with her so that we were always aware of what mood she was in, what was attracting her attention, and whether she needed anything from us.  She loved peeking over the top or through the side opening to watch the world go by, and it was the only place where she fell asleep without crying.

It also had the added benefit of making it impossible for any well-meaning stranger to swoop her up out of our arms to make a fuss over her.  She was greatly admired from an appropriate distance, but always stuck securely to one of us.

After we got back to the U.S., we continued using the carrier pretty much anytime we were out of the house. Esther went to the grocery store in it, slept through church services in it, took trips to the library in it, rode the bus in it...that was her second home!  We do have a stroller, donated by kind friends whose kids are done with such things, but I think I could literally count on both hands the times that we've used it.  I used it once to take Esther to the library on a day that I thought was too hot for the carrier, and it felt really weird to me not to be able to see her face or hear her quiet cooing.  Once she learned to walk well we started using it less frequently, but it still has gone with us to all kinds of places:

I don't have any really recent pictures of her in it, because recently I've mostly just carried it around with me in case she needed it (but she usually doesn't), or used it for long walks when it's just her and me (in which case I don't take pictures of her in it!).  The two things I've used the carrier for every week are going to the library (only a twenty-minute walk, but a good part of it along busy streets) and coming home from the grocery store (I've discovered it hurts my back less to carry both her and the groceries than it does to carry only the groceries but take twice as long to get home).  Yesterday I left the grocery store, buckled her up in the carrier, hefted both bags of groceries onto my shoulders (I use reusable bags, much easier to carry home than plastic grocery store bags), and realized that the carrier suddenly felt loose around my waist.  So I grabbed Esther with one hand to keep her from slipping out, wrestled my heavy bags back into the cart, unbuckled her and put her down, and inspected the carrier.  I found that the buckle was still buckled, but the place where the waist strap attaches to the buckle was broken, probably beyond repair.  The carrier has seen hours upon hours of use (not to mention all the extra hours I've dragged it around with me just in case), and parts of it were already showing wear, so I guess I'm not too surprised.  But, it's been a big part of our lives up until now, and I'll miss it.  I don't think it's worth replacing for the amount of future use we'd be likely to get out of it, but I wish it had held out just a few more months!  So, apparently, does Esther.  She walked home holding my hand and crying that she wanted to get up in her carrier.  :-(  She hasn't said anything about it since, so we'll see how our next trip to the grocery store or the library goes.  And I may look into getting a Mei Tai (a less structured, very lightweight carrier) for hiking.  Esther is a sturdy little hiker, but a distractible one, and sometimes it's nice to be able to get where you're going in the amount of time you had budgeted to get there.