Baby Shopping; A Reflection

Yesterday was a day of baby registering. A friend and I went to "Babies R Us" in the morning. That place is crazy! I'm so glad we have a relatively small apartment because it keeps you from believing the "you need ALL of this to properly raise a baby" brain washing. In the end I couldn't find much to register for- everything is SO big! I don't need an 8-in-1 bassinet, I just need a cozy place for the baby to sleep in our room. I don't need a baby tub that is also a bubbling spa with attachable shower head, I just need a tub that doesn't have food in it like the sink. I don't need a stroller that is large enough to fit myself, JP, the cat, and the baby and that also doubles as an all-terrain off-roading vehicle. I don't need a bouncer chair that has so many gadgets I wanted to cry while looking at it (and I think one of the toys was in my nightmare last night). And why does Everything have to be blue or pink? Even some of the car seats were boy/girl specific! A nice shade of blue is perfectly lovely for a girl's nursery and just because our baby has a penis does not mean there needs to be giant basketballs, soccer balls, and footballs all over the room.

Complaining aside, it was really fun to wander among all the aisles filled with mini products and smiling babies on the packaging. I did find several things I liked, but I did not find any nursery decor. It was either way too gender-specific or way too cheesy. If anyone has any suggestions for where to find nice looking crib sets please let me know. It just seems like you could have such sweet looking bedding for a baby- like Noah's ark, sea life, twinkle twinkle little star, etc. Most of the stuff I found had animals that looked scary or just wasn't nice looking or cute.

I dragged JP to Target in the afternoon to register there. He went straight for the toys and was certain our infant needed a giant train set and match box cars and legos and anything and everything requiring batteries or an electric motor... I steered him toward the baby stuff and he was pretty sure our baby didn't need most of it. His method is to randomly pull something off the shelf and declare that's the one we need- mine is to register for lots of things and then carefully read through the online reviews when I get home -- some combination of our two approaches is probably right. I've spent most of today on amazon.com reading reviews- its fun to see what other moms say about the different products, but now I'm really going to start doing some school work. Really.