Wow, Ultimate Baby Wrap. October 19, 2007

I wasn’t planning on participating in this week’s Parent Blogger’s blog blast because I really didn’t think I owned any products with unreasonably excessive warning labels. I mean sure, I found some toothpaste that warns you not to swallow it, and hair gel that is for EXTERNAL USE ONLY- side note: I’m throwing that out because I don’t want to use a product manufactured by people who assume that a) I am stupid enough to eat my hair gel, and b) I somehow have internal hair that MUST be styled (or internal hair, period?). But for the most part, the warnings that I found seemed pretty reasonable.

Then today, I had to take a trip to the giant baby conglomerate store, and while I was there I picked up an Ultimate Baby Wrap (this is my fourth baby carrier and third sling, and I sure hope we love this one but that’s another post for another time). It wasn’t until I got it home, took it out of the box and started to assemble (I use the term loosely) the sling around my person that I noticed the warning label.

I mean, if you’re smart enough to figure out how to wrap the damned thing AND get your nine month old son to sit in it (simultaneously), I seriously doubt your need for the following advice:

First of all, how is it even possible to leave your baby unattended while using the Ultimate Baby Wrap?! Have you seen what that thing becomes when you’re not wrapped up in it (the answer is 50 feet of plain navy blue cloth)? How could you get out? With the child still strapped in? What segment of the population can even manage something like that? Physically speaking, of course, but oh I guess also mentally speaking since you need a PhD in Rocket Surgery to get it all set up in the first place, so I’d assume you’d need to have some pretty impressive mental dexterity to figure out how to get it off without disturbing the child.

I mean honestly. And, do I have to assume that the warning is there because someone actually did leave their child unattended while wrapped in the Ultimate Baby Wrap, and then filed a lawsuit when the child realized that the nature of physics renders it impossible for the wrap to stay put together without an adult somehow involved, and so the wrap dissolved in a *poof* of realization like in the good old Warner Bros cartoons and the heretofore content child went crashing to the ground without benefit of support from the unattended Ultimate Baby Wrap + Reasonable Adult? And if this is the case, then I say enough. TOO LITIGIOUS, and these good people over at Sick of Lawsuits agree. If you’re dumb (smart?) enough to wrap your baby up in the Ultimate Baby Wrap and then take off the wrap with the child still in it, and walk away leaving the child unattended in the (magically) intact wrap, then dare I say that Ultimate Baby Wrap really didn’t have much to do with it? I mean, it appears that they worked good and hard on making the whole thing challenging enough to use that lawsuit happy dumbasses a certain kind of person should have been ruled out in the first place.

Yet I think it’s safe to assume that the last part about the car seats and not using the wrap as a vehicular restraining device for your precious cargo was reasonably added after one of Britney’s fiascos. After all, you can be too litigious, but you can never be too careful.