Preparing for Bébé, Part 3

Welcome to this week's installment of Preparing for Bébé. For those who are keeping track, I am now on Week 39 of pregnancy, and my day-to-day living can be summed up neatly in this picture. I'm pretty sure I've said the words “bladder” and “I need to pee” (or comically in French: j'ai envie de faire pipi) more in the last couple of weeks than in the entire rest of my life. At our last appointment, our midwife described the baby's head as being “très, très bas” (very, very low) in my pelvis, which is great for birth but a tad annoying in the immediate. Nevertheless, I'm feeling upbeat and optimistic, doing lots of walking, and baking double batches of chocolate chip muffins – just in case.

So for our final baby preparation blog post, I thought I would share our experiences with economizing on space in readying our apartment for the baby.

If you live or have lived in a large metropolis like Paris, you may be familiar with the concept of tiny accommodations. I, however, was not. I was used to relatively large houses with a garage, front and back yards, and plenty of personal space. Even when I went off to university and lived in a variety of cheap student apartments, there were always distinctly separate rooms and typically more space than I needed.

Coming to Paris, however, I quickly learned that space is at a premium. We have two friends who recently celebrated their move from one apartment to another one that was five times as big. Yes, they went from a whopping 7 m² (smaller than an average US bedroom) to a spacious 35 m² (75 ft² to 376 ft²). It made me realize what a luxury it is to have lots of room.

Our current apartment is 33 m² (355 ft²) and comprises a combination kitchen – living room – dining room area, plus a bedroom with an en suite bathroom. When I was reading about what furniture we would need for a baby, I kept finding pictures of immaculate nurseries that were bigger than half of our apartment. While this was somewhat disheartening, it also felt like a relief that we would not have to spend hours “designing the perfect nursery” and buy tons of furniture to decorate it with. Instead, we have had a fun time puzzling over how to fit everything into our limited space.

Puzzle #1: The crib

For example, we knew the baby's crib would need to go towards the foot of the bed in our bedroom as there was no other space big enough for it. However, most cribs on the market have dimensions that would have blocked our access to the bathroom, which would be a disaster for me in my current state of walnut-sized bladder. After weeks of searching, we thought we had settled on a smaller foldable crib that would only partially block our toilet access, but then realized it would only work for the first six months of the baby's life before it would be outgrown and we'd need a bigger crib. Back to the drawing board.

Message Classifieds to the rescue! Fortunately, I found a parent advertising a used Bloom Alma Mini crib, a fancy pants solid wood crib that is foldable and sized for “urban living spaces” with “room-to-room mobility during nap time.” Amazingly, the dimensions were perfect to slide into the nook next to our bedroom wardrobe, thus leaving plenty of space to get to the bathroom. It has an adjustable mattress height too, so it can last at least the baby's first 12 months. Hallelujah! Plus, we got it for less than half the original price. 

Puzzle #2: The changing station

If we could barely fit a crib in our bedroom, imagine trying to fit a typical diaper changing table in there too. We racked our brains to come up with a place for one and spent hours searching for small tables online, but ultimately found nothing. The solution?

The washing machine! We have a front-loading washer squeezed into our bathroom next to the sink, which happens to be at a great height for changing a baby. Just plop a contoured changing mat on top, and voilà! Of course, it wasn't quite that simple. Changing mats basically seem to come in one size, and, you guessed it! the size is bigger than our space would allow. Out of hundreds of varieties, I found only three that would sort of fit on our washing machine and none of them looked like great products. My energy spent, I enlisted Rory to continue the search in the more remote areas of the internet. Having almost given up, he finally stumbled upon a Danish product (BabyDan) on an Irish baby safety website that fit our dimensions to a T. What a relief! It may not be the most spacious baby changing area ever, but it should suffice.

Puzzle #3: Expectations vs reality

How do we fit a rocking chair in here? Where do we keep the stroller so it's not invading the whole living room? If we get a food processor/blender, where can we possibly store it? These are the other kinds of small living space questions we've been grappling with. Before coming to Paris, I now realize I had a lot of expectations about what constitutes a home, especially a home with two tax-paying grown-ups and a baby inside it. Years of subconscious media absorption led me to believe that a rocking chair was an absolutely essential element for nursing mothers. And I would have been fairly scandalized at the idea of storing kitchen appliances in the living room. These are very silly, trivial issues, especially in light of the massive problems facing the world today, but they have shown me how rigid my ideas have become on even some of the most frivolous of topics. Thank god for eye-opening experiences like moving to a new country.

As it turns out, rocking chairs are not mandatory for nursing mothers. They're not even that common in France. We opted to fill that space in our living room instead with a foldable dining table so that we could invite friends and family over for meals (there was previously only dining space for Rory and me). The food processor fits beautifully in our bookcase next to the baby books—why shouldn't it? And the folded stroller has found a home in a corner of the living room.

Sometimes the biggest puzzle in preparing for a baby is simply learning how to let go of your expectations. Most of us have developed beliefs over many years about the right way to do things. In coming to France, I've been reminded over and over that there are many right ways to live, to raise children, to furnish a home, to be successful, to be happy, and that our limited experience as humans can't possibly give us the omniscience to know the single best way to be. So try new things. Turn off that judgy voice in your head when you see something that doesn't conform to your expectations. Because really, we all just have the same goal. In the words of Tim Gunn, we have to “Make it work!”