Mankind: A Million Years of Luck and Survival by Fisher Price

So, my younger brother is having a baby. We've been doing renovations and decking out the house with stuff and places for the baby. While I was at the grocery store my mom pointed out how gigantic the baby stuff section is. It covers 80% of the wall, two aisles thick.

My first thought here was, "how the fuck did mankind ever survive without all this crap?" What did we do before $30 baby pillows and $40 baby outfits and $60 baby toys and $300 baby boxes?

$300?! For a baby box?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what I'm talking about, break it down a minute.

It's a box. A box that you put your baby in. You slept in one, I slept in one. I think they call them cribs, but I'm pretty sure that's what gangstas call houses. And they seem to cost just as much. It's like a scale version of a house with equally scaled cost, only you don't get a yard or bathrooms or outlets because your baby isn't an equally scaled version of a person.

My point is that for $300 I'm going to make my own fucking baby crate! I don't remember the one I grew up in and neither do you. And if you do, you certainly didn't care that it was $300.

I think a lot of people scoff at the cheapness of that plan, as if it were unthinkable that someone would put a baby in a non-professionally handcrafted wooden cage. Perhaps the precision engineering yields to the child superior growth and mental ability. Perhaps its finely tuned aesthetic design that has been passed down for generations soothes the child into a more restful state. Perhaps they imbue the very materials with ancient magicks in the factory which can never be replicated. Or perhaps it's just an overpriced box that you keep your kid in until you have to throw it out because your kid needs a bed in a few years.