Penny

The CRIB.

Matt opened the box at about 8:45. We got it done about an hour later. Less time than I'd have thought, to be honest.

But what kind of hour was it? Was it a living hell that we would rather cut off our feet than live through again?

Actually, it could have been worse. I'm not saying it was fun, mind you. There were plenty of problems.

Directions? Crap. Written by people who apparently grew up speaking some obscure dialect of an extinct aboriginal island folk. Also, very poorly proofread. "PICTUR 1" "CAREFUL YTIGHTEN"

The pictures that went with the directions? Worse than crap. They were fuzzy and grainy - it looked like they'd been neatly drawn and then sent through a fax about four times before being attached to the master copy of the instructions. But even the originals couldn't have been very helpful.

And here's a good one for you. The mattress frame is made to be adjustable - so you can set it fairly high for a new baby who isn't going to move around much, then lower it when the kid can sit up and again when it can stand, to keep them from climbing out of the crib. The directions didn't even mention the adjustable feature. The picture showed the screw going in at the lowest of four different settings. We had to figure out the whole setting thing ourselves.

The worst part, of course, was the side that's meant to go up and down, to make it easier to get to the baby. It didn't want to line up on the tracks. It didn't want to slide on the tracks once we got it lined up. Once we got it on, it didn't want to lock into place, and we had to take it off again and do the whole thing over again so we could try to figure out where we went wrong.

It still doesn't completely lock into place the way it should. There's a little more give on one side than there should be. On the other hand, we can't force the railing down by leaning on it anymore (which we could, the first time), so we hope it'll be okay.

But it wasn't nearly as bad as it might have been. And there were some good things.

It's still a very nice-looking crib. The honey color of the wood looks nice on the blue walls. And except for the moving rail, the rest of it went together very smoothly, without any real hassle.

I had worried that the mattress would be too small for the crib; it's very nearly too big. (The safety regs suggest that the mattress fit into the crib with no more than two fingers of space between it and the crib railings. Matt could barely squeeze one finger in there.)

But enough rambling. I know what you want. You want pictures!!!