Friday, July 03, 2009

In case you're thinking of spending $40,000 on a kid's bed ...

In the midwife's office the other day I was leafing through a baby magazine and saw an add for cute crib bedding; the company name stuck in my head, and at home I looked it up. Well, the bedding in question cost five times what our crib cost!!! For real! Snort snort, chuckle chuckle. And compared to other stuff on the site, the bedding is a steal. So I guess poshtots.com is for rich people. Really, the name says it all! I've never loved the word "posh." Posh, I am not. It's always fun to browse in the realm of the ridiculous though, so here we go:

Neato dresser!
Only $16,200! I'll take two.
How about a dresser that's been gnawed by a beaver?
$7,200. Beaver not included. (For that price, I want the rodent! How about a beaver trained to make a perfect latte? Really, for $7000 . . . )
Exploding cabinet! $9000!
The very pretty Rosalie three-drawer dresser; by now I find myself thinking, "Wow, this one's only $1726." ha ha!

But frankly, dressers are small potatoes. Let's look at beds, starting with a cheap one:
The lovely "pink Cucciolo Venice bed" is custom-painted with a portrait of your chosen AKC breed of dog. Huh. But that's nothing. Look at this:
Yeah. That's a bed. A $75,000 bed!!! Here's the inside:
Is it just me, or does it seem that a child who sleeps in a bed like this would grow up to be a very unpleasant person? I see ringlet curls and tantrums. I see cruelty to the less fortunate. I see "let them eat cake."

There's another style of coach too, a bit more "Cinderella" and only $47,000, if you're on a budget.


But really, why sleep in a vehicle (kind of low brow, really, like living in a car!), when your bed can be a house?


English Tudor cottage bed, $14,450; Gingerbread cottage, $15,300; Princess palace playhouse bed, $47,000. Yeah.

And those are just beds. Check out the playhouses!!! Oy. Rich people. How much do you suppose it costs Habitat for Humanity to build an entire house in, say, Cameroon or Ecuador? I really have no idea. Less than $47,000?

I love playhouses, though. I dream of one day having a fabulous tree house, not so much for the kids as for me! It would have a deck comfortable enough to sit out on and sip a glass of wine, and perhaps a suspension bridge to an outpost in another tree. Somewhere with a good view from which to watch the Apocalypse through binoculars. ha ha. Or, hey, to watch the Rapture. That will be quite a sight for the earthbound among us!

Well. Needless to say, there is nothing at that rich-person website I will be ordering. The new nursery is inching toward completion though! Yesterday I primed it for painting before Jim had a spell and ordered me out of the paint fumes. Bah. There's so much to do! See, this husband of mine got a last-minute notion to take on the itsy bitsy project of refinishing the wood floors downstairs, so he's buzzing away with various sanders and the house is a shambles. It's going to be awesome, though. I can't WAIT to reassemble everything! With the living room empty, it's very tempting to want to paint it; it's been about 7 years. But if I'm not allowed to paint . . . and we already have the bathroom, bedroom, and nursery to paint. Maybe another room is too much. But . . . it's the perfect time! Sigh. Nesting-overdrive. Can't wait for the actual nesting part.

Pictures as soon as there's something to show!

19 comments:

Tricia said...

The $600 baby bedding (dry clean only - are they kidding?) just cracks me up. This place is in Richmond. Who knew there were so many disgustingly rich people here? It's a crazy, crazy world!

Stephanie Perkins said...

Um, I totally want the $75k carriage (tantrum) bed.

And the wobbly-looking dressers. And the pirate ship playhouse (adult-sized, please) on their website. AND the treehouse on the cover of this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Treehouse-Book-Peter-Nelson/dp/0789304112

Is that too much to ask?

Also, you should receive a special gift in the mail next week. I didn't tell you that I am SECRETLY WEALTHY and had that company custom design a faery hideout style bed for Professor. It only cost a quarter of a million dollars, so I think I got a pretty good deal. No need to feel bad, or like you owe me anything.

Unknown said...

I love that first dresser, but the rest is revolting.

Lexi said...

I know what I want for my birthday now! Thank you Laini!

The only problem now is the question of where to put my parents. I'm thinking we'll have to sell the actual house and relocate them to a luxury dog mansion. I hope they fit!

Anonymous said...

Unbelievable, I was just going to head out to Ikea to pick up the plainest cot I could find. I think these cots and things are sad, thieves of childhood imaginations - wasn't it more fun and enduring to imagine one's bed was a castle, when believing made it so?

look forward to seeing the pics, am turning my study into a baby room myself at the moment

Anonymous said...

I would have loved a bed like that when I was a little kid!

Deirdre said...

Yikes! Some of these beds cost more than my parents first two houses. Combined.

Anonymous said...

Okay, obviously I never would have asked for that $75,000 bed, but I would TOTALLY have had fantasies about being the child of gazillionaires who would buy me one. :)

Unknown said...

OK, I LOVE the exploding dresser!


(And six year old me secretly wants the carriage and doesn't care that she'll turn into a dog-in-purse tantrum-throwing brat.)

Unknown said...

OMG...and I just totally noticed that the Laini's Lady in the sidebar is the "Indulge" one!!!

Liz B said...

One of my first thoughts on seeing those beds is, do you know how hard it will be to change the sheets and make the beds? Oh, that's right; at those costs, they have help.

Second, they are the types of beds some kids dream about and aren't they supposed to stay in dreams? I used to want a canopy bed as a child (as a grownup I think OMG The dust those things must collect, no way.)

And finally, I picture the child totally spray painting the bed black when they hit middle school and decorating with skulls. But I wonder if these will be the parents who then order a 50K teen rebellion black bed? Must head over to the link to see if "poshtots" then serves "surlyteens".

tanita✿davis said...

Hee hee hee!
I see ringlets and tantrums, too. Mainly from the adults, if they've lost their wits long enough to buy something that expensive. Can you imagine the first time the kid decides to go on a wall-with-crayons spree? They'd be dead. Mom would be too pissed about them "ruining" something that expensive.

You and Jim will come up with something infinitely weirder and better. And no ringlets.

Anonymous said...

When I was young, I always wanted a playhouse like that. Now I can see that it would have TOTALLY spoiled me and, like you said, I probably would have ringlet curls and tantrums.

~Molly~ said...

Having three wild-child kids, I can tell you what the carriage beds would be at my house. Cheese-it crumb traps among other things! There would be broken crayons, marbles, little jibbles of paper, dirt, dirt, dirt, possibly broken glass, pizza crusts, and all manner of dust rhinos hiding in there!! Oh gross. I'd much rather keep the mattress and box springs they have on hollywood frames!

Gondal-girl nailed it, these things are definitely imagination drains. However, my brilliant children would have pretended the beds were pirate ships or some such! And yes, two are teens now and would totally decorate in skulls if they could(or kitties and pole-dancer shoes). It is a fun age, I really mean that too.*G*

Molly

Heather said...

I know exactly which website those things came from. I used to look at them when I was pregnant and laugh. And I giggle that the Cinderella coach is outside - that's about where it would fit in my house!

Anonymous said...

1. Some of those things are really neat, just not seventy-five thousand dollars neat, I can't belive that people actually buy things like that. There are far better things to spend that much money on.

2. While they are cool, cost aside, they look impractical. How are the little kids who own these things supposed to reach drawers that are way over their heads? And even in some of the pictures those beds take up the entire room!

3. I am a teen and I would never ruin something like that. I think they would be fun to play in, but it is also fun to build your own fort. Often a large part of the fun of a game is in setting it up.

4. If you pamper a child that much they will probably be pretty darn spoiled.


-QZQ

persnickety_jen said...

The Rosalie dresser is pretty and the wobbly dressers are fun, but those prices are ridiculous. I wouldn't spend money like that on myself, let alone on a wee someone who's going to outgrow it in 4 years and have a permanently stunted imagination...

I wrote grants for Habitat for Humanity after college, and you're absolutely right. The cash cost of a house varies, depending on region and size and donations. But if the people shopping at poshtots.com were to donate that money instead, a family with 5+ people could have a brand new house.

Oy. This makes me want to go live in a 75 square-foot Tumbleweed house.

Amber said...

Oh my gosh, every time I see stuff like that-- or in magazines about how much some lame coat costs, that Paris Hilton wears, or something-- I always think something like that: How many needy kids could have coats for this price? It is gross, imo.

BUT, I think it would be cool to copy these ideas, and build something like these WITH your kid, if you were so talented. They are cool...just way tooooo much money to spend of stuff like that.

Show pics when you are done?

:)

findingmywingsinlife said...

Laini,
Wow. Does anyone really need all that? Let alone a kid?

I don't know about Cameroon or Ecuador, but the Habitat for Humanity I work for tithes to Guatemala in the "house for a house" program. For every home we build in our area, we raise enough funds to build a home in Guatemala as well, and in their case it takes slightly over $3,000 U.S dollars to build one home there. Kind of puts things into perspective doesn't it?