Well that'll teach me to be nosey

Much to the mutual chagrin of our husbands, my neighbour M and I enjoy going to open houses. Just to be clear, neither of us are planning to pull up stakes and hightail it out of the neighbourhood - we do it purely out of curiosity. To see other homes like ours, to check out paint colours, to see where they've put their couches, to ooh and ahh over houses that are bigger than ours...and sometimes to giggle at ugly curtains and hideous bedspreads.

Hey, we're ladies.

Anyway, we headed out on Sunday afternoon to check out a large home a few streets away. This time it wasn't purely nosy-neighbour syndrome though, since M has friends who are interested in moving into the area and she wanted to check the place out for them.

It may have been our first semi-legit real estate outing.

We wandered through the main floor, did the typical small talk with the agent and headed upstairs to the much touted master bedroom.

Master indeed. It could have swallowed up most of our bedrooms in one gulp! And it was nice. Big, bright and airy.

So big, in fact, that it housed the nursery along one wall.

I sort of started a bit when I saw the crib, but I've seen baby stuff before. I've been in my neighbour's house WITH her baby a million times, for heaven's sake. I can deal with seeing a crib and baby accessories and even little outfits hung in the closet (we've very thorough when we snoop through open houses).

But what really did me in was the change table. It's the exact same one we had for Thomas. Exactly. The. Same.

I stopped, pointed and said "Oh. Oh - that's the change table we had."

Then I stood there dumbly staring at it. As thought if I stared long enough I would magically be transported back to our nursery. The long-gone nursery of two years ago.

I see our change table every day. It's still up in the spare room, and except for the first drawer which holds special mementos from Thomas' life, it's now being used for yarn and craft storage. I'm totally used to seeing it.

I'd just forgotten what it looked like when it was covered in baby things being used for the purpose we bought it for.

I immediately looked to the crib to see if everything was the same in this weird parallel universe.

And you know what? I don't know. I can't for the life of me remember exactly what Thomas' crib looks like. I walked into that nursery a million times a day and stood there staring at it, dreaming of what it would be like to see his little face looking back at me, and now I can't remember what the crib looks like.

It's in the basement, tucked away beside the empty bassinet. Forgotten.

Fuck.

Well that'll teach me to be nosy, won't it?