How to sell baby clothes on eBay and not get too nostalgic

I keep seeing the baby on the Jolly Jumper box out of the corner of my eye. It's not just that his facial expression is somewhat reminiscent of a blow-up doll.

Alright, that's all it is.

Given that I'm not having any more babies, I've been selling all Luka's all baby stuff on eBay. Word to the wise, that shit is the shit. Admittedly, I did keep pretty much everything, and I have been selling kids clothes on eBay for a while before now (thanks, Savers). But not having to outlay for all the stock has been pretty good, I've made over $800 profit just from Luka's stash.

I have my own little rules for selling old baby clothes on eBay.

First, take a scalpel and sever the memories of your baby from the more valuable items. Specifically, if you have any Seed, Fred Bare, Ralph Lauren, Bebe, PureBaby, Grobag, Eeni Meeni Mini Moe, oh I could go on. Suffice to say, if you have a reasonable label, imagine your tiny googly tiny perfect tiny baby never looked cute in it, and instead imagine the quite nice quiet dinner in a restaurant without your strapping filthy "I WON'T and you can't MAKE me" 4 year old it could buy you.

Rule number two: Wash the item of clothing and de-stain it as much as possible, and dry it flat. Lay it out on a white sheet in natural light, and take a pretty photo. Fold down one sleeve in a devil-may-care manner, if you're feeling wild.

Rule number three: Keep your descriptions short and formatted. I have a template for my listings that basically runs like this:

Brand: [insert]
Description: [Keep it brief and try not to be too embarrassed about the exclamation marks. Eg. "This lovely boys romper features a dragon motif and is striped in blue and red. Fastens at shoulders and crotch with studs. So cute for winter! Winter is coming!"]
Material: [insert, eg: cotton/acrylic/polyester/steel mesh]
Condition: [If there's nothing really wrong with it, I go with "Excellent secondhand condition, no faults." Amend as necessary, eg "Very good secondhand condition, overall light pilling, one hole (neatly repaired) due to dire wolf incident"]
Size: [I always say "This item is tagged a size [insert]. If you require any further measurements, please ask." That way if the tag says 00 but it's based on Hodor-sized babies, you're covered.]

Rule number four: Have a returns policy. Mine basically says if I missed something then it's my fault and we can bargain. If it doesn't fit as your baby isn't Tyrion it's your fault and you should have asked because who knew things are tagged different sizes in different lands. If someone kicks a major hissy I usually just refund them, as the reputation of my house is more valuable than $5.50.

Rule number five: If you can, list about 20 items at a time, have them all end at close-together bidding-friendly times (eg. weekends late morning or after kiddy bed time or just after a battle), and mix good brand listings with ordinary stuff so that people, as I do myself, will think "Well, I'm bidding on this one quality item, I may as well fill up a Postpak to the full 500g to get my money's worth."

Rule number six: Post stuff fast. No one likes a Bastard Slow.

That baby is still looking at me, from the cardboard box of the Jolly Jumper.

I do remember Luka bouncing about in it. Incidentally, it kept us both happy in the same room for long periods, I played loud Beatles music while singing along and listing stuff on eBay, and he jumped about in the doorway in a puddle of his own drool, gurling the lyrics along with me in his own curious language. Possibly Dothraki.

But it's just a thing. It's a thing I don't need, and a thing that can make me money that I do need.

When I need more stuff to sell, or better quality brands to blend in with the Target/K-Mart stuff left in the current tub of Luka-clothes, we get on the bus together, as we've done since before he was born, and we go to Savers. Instead of being a swimmer in a belly, or a baby in a pram playing with a plastic Savers coathanger, these days he keeps himself happy in the toy section blaring up and down with a toy truck while I flick through the brands on the racks.

And when I've gathered together a stroller-handle-load of stuff to sell, I tell him to pick which toy he wants to take home that day, as they're cheap as proverbials.

He always picks the biggest toy car possible, one that he can't hold on his own lap even all the way back to the bus stop.

And we pay the $5 for it, get on the bus, and go back home.

In the mornings and evenings when he's asleep or away, I list the Savers stuff and our own old stuff on eBay.

Next week, some other baby might be dancing in a doorway to Twist 'n' Shout.

We both bought t-shirts

(A poem cut together from texts. I'd forgotten I'd written this.)

It would be darker in the morning.

I pick my battles, perhaps

even if it’s clearly more of a stifled yawn

a relay race for people who have lost interest.

I haven’t had a shower and I’m in yesterday’s makeup

Exhausted, asleep, but missing you still

thinking of you up there all alone

small is important too.

Then the usual domestic shite

I dreamed I was at Big W with you

I have mellowed over the years

we both bought t-shirts.

Get your subconscious to role-play it

I would be happy just to see if

I loved bolting into town

any time/place/dress code.

It’s excellent indoor weather

the sky is appropriately grey and

all buses pass my place at some point

you might want to buy an umbrella.

Leaned down and caught the scent of you on a cushion.

I open my eyes, and yours are shut

every time I look at my watch I am closer to

seeing the longing in my heart.

We could have a little while together

even better, it will keep happening

so much work into that mix

I will also finally feed you an oyster.

Friday is writing day.

To misquote Thomas Mann*, "A parent is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Friday is my designated writing day. It's my one day off work a week. Luka doesn't know that. There are lots of things he conveniently doesn't know, like how sometimes he goes to daycare in what are technically pyjamas, and that batteries can be replaced. The day that fucking Elmo guitar with no volume control wore out was one of the best days of my motherhood.

Anyway, on Friday mornings I resist the urge to potter about the house in my pyjamas while my son creates a small yet surprisingly adhesive trail of Rice Bubbles along the lounge room tiles.

Up! Shower! Pants! Relatively clean bra! Top! Shoes!

(that's me)

Nappy! Clothes that may or may not have been intended to be worn as pyjamas! Hair gel so you can see out from under that mop! When did I last clean your teeth! Oh well we'll do them tonight! Shoes! Rice Bubbles!

(that's Luka)

"I want you to do it."
"You want me to do what? You want me to feed you your Rice Bubbles?"
*blonde head nods*
"But you can do that yourself! I need to comb my hair out."
He gently rests his forehead on the edge of the table and pushes the Rice Bubbles away.
*sigh* "All right."

I shovel spoonfuls of breakfast confetti into my son with one hand while running a brush through my hair with the other. Occasionally my multi-tasking limbs get confused and I run a spoonful of warm milk through Luka's curls. He thinks this is hilarious.

Right. We're ready to head to daycare. Then writing day will commence.

"Mum, I've got a big poo."

I stop at the front door, keys and four thousand bags in hand. "Really?"

He stand on his toes and shuffles towards me in poo-stance. I smell him before he gets to me. Birthday cake has a lot to answer for. Bags down, into the bedroom.

"Righto, lie down. No, lie down here, I can't reach you there. You can play with Thomas when you get home from daycare. Lie down here. Luka. Now. We have to go catch the bus, come on, lie down. No, dummies are for sleeping, you know that. Luka. Lie. Down. Now."

10 minutes later the poo has been dealt with. Back to the front door.

"Luka, where have you put my keys?"
"I made a hide-and-seek! You count!"
"We haven't got time, can you find them for me?"
"You count!"
*pause* "I'll count and you see how fast you can find them, okay?"
"Okay!" (Another thing that Luka conveniently doesn't know are the technical points of hide-and-seek.)
"One, two, three, four, five - leave that jacket there we've got another one in your bag - six, seven - you're looking for the keys, remember? Eight..."

Another 10 minutes later and we are successfully on the other side of the door.

"I'm a bit sad," says Luka in a small voice. I squat down.
"Why are you a bit sad?" I ask.
"In my face," he answers. I put a hand to his face. It's pretty warm. I put my hand up under his t-shirt. His back is pretty warm too. I hesitate.
"Do you want some medicine before daycare?" I ask. Maybe Panadol will head things off at the pass.
"Yeeeeeah."

Back inside.

"What do you weigh, Luka?" I study the dosing guide on the bottle of Panadol.
"Okay," he says.

One weigh-in, 9ml and another 10 minutes later, we have made it to the bottom of the stairs and Luka is clipped into the stroller.

"Right!" I am triumphant, we've made it out of the apartment and it's still only 9:30am.

"I want to hold my bag," says Luka.

I reach for his bag. I've left it in the apartment. I glance up and down the hall. There's no one around. "You just stay here, okay, I'll run up and get it?"

"No, I wanna go with you."
"I'll just be a minute, I'll just run upstairs and-"
"Noooooo I wannna go with yoooooou!" He starts to wail. I do some involuntary fist-clenching, followed by some voluntary quiet swearing.

"Fucking," says Luka. I glance around to see if anyone is proffering my Parent Of The Year award, but there are no gleaming statuettes in evidence.

With my teeth carefully pressed together, I unclip him from the stroller, unwind the complex pretzel of my handbag strap from the handles and hold his hand while he takes the stairs one step at an interminably slow time.

"Do you want to put your bag on your back?" I ask, once we're inside again.
"I've got a big poo."
"Really?"
"Yep."
"Can I have a look down your pants?"
"Okay."

Fifteen minutes and another nappy later, I am re-pretzeling my handbag strap around the stroller.

The next bit runs so smoothly that I am quite unnerved. We stagger up to the bus stop three minutes before the bus arrives, and I manage to wrestle my wagon-load of child, stroller and bags onto the bus while only gouging out a relatively small chunk of my calf.

The traffic is light. The bus stops right outside the daycare centre. This is going well.

"This is where we hang up your bag, this is Luka's hook."
"That's MY bag."
"Yep."

"Hi Luka! Our friend Luka is here, everyone!" Winnie waves to Luka and he waves back in that whole-body toddler fashion that threatens to take out any object within arm's length. Toddler arms are a bit like Labrador tails. Enthusiastic and fatal to heirloom china.

"That's a great top, Luka!" says Winnie.
"These are my monster pyjamas!" replies Luka.

Ah. Scratch one thing off the list of 'things Luka conveniently does not know'.

Forty minutes later I'm back at my apartment, cup of tea in hand, laptop on. I glance at the pile of breakfast dishes, but I don't let them distract me. I choose to believe that they will be taken care of at some point during the day by my invisible, domestic-hero boyfriend. He really is a dear, and always knows just the right time of evening to suggest I stop hanging up the washing, put my feet up and order pizza. (I have to order a large pizza, obviously, because there's two of us. Invisible boyfriends can really put away the slices.)

"Right," I say. I say 'right' a lot.

I open the story I have been working on to reacquaint myself with where I was up to, and wonder why my characters roll their eyes and nod so much. I think they need to say 'right' more often.

I've written four halting paragraphs when my mobile rings. I swear, press ALT-F-S (which can theoretically stand for File-Save or Fuck's-Sake) and pick up my phone. It's the daycare centre.

"Hello?"
"Hello, is this Anna? This is Winnie, from the daycare. Ah, was Luka unwell this morning?"
"Um, he seemed pretty okay, a bit warm maybe."
"Yeah, he's seeming a bit unwell today, I think his temperature is about 39, and he just want to lie down on the floor and rest all the time?"

I look at my laptop screen. There's a nice little standoff between Guilt and Annoyance in my head. Guilt pokes Annoyance in the eyes and pulls her hair. Guilt fights dirty.

"I probably should come and get him, shouldn't I?"
"Yeah, I think it would be good. Thankyou Anna, see you soon!"

I gently shut my laptop and pick up my keys. The weather has heated up. When I finally get back to the daycare centre, I'm a sweaty mass of frustration and chafed thighs. I stride through to the toddler room, and each step echoes like a diminishing word count. Annoyance has obviously picked herself up off the ropes and bitten Guilt on the nose.

"Hey, Luka."
He turns his soft face up to mine. He's so pale he's almost translucent, and the rims of his little eyes are red.
"I'm a little bit sick," he says.
I pick him up and he leans against me, resting his head on my shoulder. He's very warm, and I can feel his little arms quivering.
"Can we go home and have a little sleep?" he asks in a small voice.

Guilt pulls an AK-47 from her pants and efficiently obliterates Annoyance.

"Course we can, buddy. I'm sorry you're a little bit sick. Do you want some Tiny Teddies when we get home?"
"Okay."

I cuddle his hot little body a bit closer.

There's a Friday every week.

*In case you're wondering, the original is: "A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

I'm turning the world into birds

The last 1.5 hours of my library shift last approximately 5.4 hours (5.9 if Daylight Savings has ended).

10am-7pm is hardly an epic work day, but that dingy hour-and-a-half after everyone else goes home appears to turn my brain into some kind of weary meat soup, and my only intellectual ability is to create more misunderstandings than that time I went to the supermarket and only bought a packet of AA batteries and a carrot.

Typical exchange #1:

Borrower: "Can I borrow these please?"
Me: "Sure." I scan their student card, hand it back and then attempt to check out the dvds. The student card hasn't scanned.
Me, enunciating badly: "Sorry, can I have your card again?"
Borrower, looking down at their cardigan: "Sorry?"

Typical exchange #2:

Borrower: "Sorry, these are a few days overdue. Is there a fine?"
Me: "No, that's fine."
Borrower, frowning: "What's the fine?"
Me: "No, it's fine, no fine."
Borrower: "Can I pay it here?"

etc. I'm tired.

At 6:55pm I wander around the library using my best Mum-voice to break through to the iPod-deaf students in the Science Fiction collection, and the stellar examples of young love that lie entertwined and lust-deaf in the bean bag room.

"THE LIBRARY IS CLOSING IN FIVE MINUTES!"

The iPod kids nod vaguely at me and re-prop their George R. R. Martins back against the door. The young lovers spring apart like I'm their dad and I've just walked in on a particularly practical homework session.

I turn off the music (I've recently discovered that playing the Labyrinth soundtrack just before closing is a good way to get rid of everyone, for some reason), click the bolts across the doors and turn off the lights. There's a muffled shriek and some mad rustling from the other room as someone who has fallen asleep both on and under a bean bag realises they're about to be locked in. They shuffle to the exit and I let them out.

The fluorescent tubes flicker out and I stand alone for a few minutes. Have you ever hung out in a closed library? It's really nice. Warm and dark and booky. Given that I start work again at 8:30am tomorrow, sometimes I consider just making myself a nest of bean bags and sleeping over. Pretend I'm Lynda Day sleeping at the Junior Gazette headquarters. But even without the frizzy perm, it might scare the cleaners to find a bleary-eyed, flannel-pyjamaed librarian where there should really only be empty bean bags and the occasional mouse.

So I wander through the deserted Union House, with its permanent aroma of sushi and feet, across campus to my bus stop. I put on my headphones, partly to listen to music but mostly as a kind of hipster head-band to keep my hair out of my face.

In the peripherest of my peripheral vision, I see two sparrows flitting confidently along the ground towards me. I like a small brown bird as much as the next librarian, but I don’t often, well, hang out with them. I turn my head as slowly as I can so as not to scare them and discover that my new feathered friends are in fact scrunched-up-brown-paper-friends, probably originating from Baker’s Delight, that have blown along the steps towards me.

I’m vaguely disappointed at this dissolution of my prospectively Hitchcockian moment. But only briefly because at that point my bus turns up. One minute early! I wonder why everyone else looks so bloody grumpy about this, but after a few travelers ask the driver “Are you the 6:42?” I realise that this bus is not in fact 1 minute early but 29 minutes late.

The bus skittles towards Clifton Hill and past the tennis courts. I’ve let shuffle choose the tunes and it’s chosen Dolly Parton. While ‘9 to 5’ isn’t entirely accurate for my day, I’m the first to admit that ‘10 to 7’ doesn’t have quite the same je ne sais ménage à trois. (I may have done 1^st year uni statistics, but I only did French to year 10.) And at least it's not 'His Eye is on the Sparrow'.

I gaze into the middle distance as we pull up at Clifton Hill station. My gaze scans lazily along the bottom of the tennis court fence.

At the base of it I see a pair of seagulls. They are waltzing.

Their white bodies shuffle back and forth in perfect three-quarter time, like little pale boats cresting the same wave.

I blink, and lean forward in my seat. The feathered flamencos gradually resolve, and I realise the mesh that covers the fence all except the bottom 30cm is obscuring the very human, tennis-playing legs that are connected to the seagulls that are, in fact, a pair white sneakers. As the player dances back and forth, my eyes still catch a bird-like echo in his feet.

So at this point I'm seriously considering either taking up twitching or getting my contact lens prescription checked.

As the bus flings itself up along towards Alphington, I let shuffle take over again and am pleasantly rewarded by a corny rendition of 'Two Hearts Swing in Three-Quarter Time' by Michael Feinstein.

The bus lurches to a halt outside a shop whose signage simply proclaims "TOOLS!" and I try not to take it personally.

I lean my head against the bus window. An enormous raven whizzes right past my head and I instinctively jerk away from the glass in shock.

"Fuck me dead!" I exclaim under my breath. At least, I think it's under my breath but the looks from my fellow passengers suggest it is more 'under my breath while I have headphones on' than 'under my breath when I can hear the volume of my own voice'.

I peer out the window down the road, trying to catch the flight-path of this over-sized cousin of the writing desk.

I can't see any birds, but there is a cyclist waiting up at the red light ahead. His head is at about the height of my bus window, and he's wearing a large, black, aerodynamic helmet. It doesn't look much like a writing desk, but I think I've located my giant Quoth.*

I'm turning the world into birds. What am I going to ornithologically Rorschach next? Does Rorschach** even work as a verb?

My bus purrs on towards Ivanhoe, and the evening light clicks over to that syrupy golden haze that singles out each tree and tells every leaf it's a miracle. As the bus reaches the top of a hill, a large tree rears into view. It's been pruned vigorously to allow the power lines to run through the middle.

Large leafy limbs curve up on either side, straddling the electric tightropes. The evening gilt fades in an instant and the tree arcs in flightless silhouette. I briefly hold my breath at this clipped delusion. The bus drives on.

My iPod shuffles and the first notes of The Leisure Society's 'Love's Enormous Wings' curl around my ears.

__________________________________________________________

* Apologies to Terry Pratchett.

** Autocorrect suggested 'cornstarch' in place of Rorschach. I expect the next gelatinous mass I see will look like a pigeon.