The time I accidentally almost bought a (gorgeous! but still) Kilim rug off of eBay

Nighttimes are interesting around here lately. And by lately I mean for the last four and a half months. I am trying not to be a mommy martyr about it because I mean when we had a baby we knew we wouldn’t be getting much sleep – that’s kind of the deal, right? 

You get an all access pass to chubby bellies and gurgling laughs and unlimited hugs and entertainment, but you don’t get sleep. We were prepared for that. Nevermind the delicious trickery that happened in months 0-6 where Olive was a rockstar sleeper, we don’t talk about that anymore. For fear of nostalgic tears. 

So anyway I am taking it as this matter of fact, “We have a baby. We, like most people who have a baby, aren’t sleeping” and leaving it at that. Nevertheless, the ramifications of this sleep loss do make themselves known in strange and interesting ways. Like the time I accidentally almost bought a $200 rug from eBay because I was so sleep deprived.

This was the rug – and I am not going to lie, when I woke up the next morning and read the “You currently have the winning bid!” eBay email I was filled with a mixture of “What the WHAT? No! How am I going to explain THIS?” and “Oooh! Pretty!”.

It didn’t come totally out of left field, this rug. I am moderately to severely obsessed with jaunty Kilim rugs right now, and I like to think that this bid was my subconscious’ way of acting out all of the nesting urges that my conscious self is to practical to engage in. I mean who buys a $200 rug without a room to put it in? 

This is what happened: I was sleeping, Olive started crying, so I went and lifted her out of her crib and took her into bed with me to nurse. I found myself sleepy, but awake, so I grabbed my trusty iPhone to see if anyone had posted anything interesting at 4:08 am (Answer: no. No one ever posts anything interesting at 4:08 am. I really need to branch out my social networks to include people in different time zones so the Internet can entertain me at all hours of the night and day. Dream big, Madeleine. Dream big.)

On my iPhone I decided to open eBay on a whim, for I am not an eBay person – something about the competitiveness of bidding, I just hate it. When I was in Thailand I infuriated the street vendors by just paying whatever they were asking. 800 baht? Sure! Here you go! I figured I was doing a good thing, because here I was this entitled white girl on vacation, who was I to be haggling over what amounted to $1-2 Canadian dollars?

It wasn’t until our guide, a sweet Thai man named Pipith, informed us that by not haggling I was ruining their day because the vendors immediately started second guessing their prices and wishing they had asked for more, that I realized my mistake. And then I just started shopping by proxy, making one of my friends do all of my haggling for me.

“I want that wooden photo album” I would whisper surreptitiously, and she would do the haggling, which she quite enjoyed, and look at me every so often for confirmation and  I would give tiny indiscernible signals like nods or ear pulls. It was all very clandestine and exciting. 

So I opened eBay and searched for Kilim rugs. And then I don’t know what happened next but I can guess, judging by my email account, that I put in a bid on that rug. The gorgeous multicoloured monstrosity you see above. I don’t know what I wanted it for. Olive’s future room maybe? A bathroom? It’s a beautiful vintage thing, 60 years old but roughly 5×7 in size, which can be kind an awkward size for a rug anyway. 

(That’s me trying to console myself because I didn’t win the rug I didn’t even know I wanted)

For the whole rest of the day I kept compulsively checking my email account, because the auction closed at 6pm. I was able to do this without raising anyone’s suspicions because I always compulsively check my email account. 

And then at 5:47 I got an email that I had been outbid. By two measly dollars! Internets, I was so relieved. And outraged! And relieved. And heartbroken! 

I had already prepared my, “Haha, oh my goodness, you’ll never guess what I did last night!” speech to Adam. I would recite the funny tale of a sleep deprived mother’s sleepwalking antics and Adam would laugh and I would laugh and when the rug was delivered (within 5-7 days, as promised) we would admire it and laugh some more. Maybe talk about how I made good decisions in my sleep. And in our future home whenever anyone commented on the rug we would get a kick out of telling people how I accidentally bought it at 4:08 am one long summer’s night, when Olive was just a baby. 

I am not saying that I considered re-bidding, but I didn’t not consider it. My finger hovered over the button, is what I am saying. 

Is it a bad thing that what stopped me wasn’t the impracticality of buying a completely unnecessary rug with nowhere to put it, but instead, my reluctance as a  writer to interfere with the integrity of the narrative?

So it was with wistful sadness that I bid adieu to the rug. And hid my eBay app in a harder to locate folder on my phone. But when I went to the expired listing to get the picture for this post, a “Related Items” tab popped up, and what should appear  but THIS little darling!

Oh my.