It's a Racket?

So, over the course of the last week or so, Jay and I have successfully (with a little sage advice from my mother) registered for baby gifts. It was quite an ordeal. There's nothing like a huge baby superstore to make clueless first time parents feel even more overwhelmed. The sheer volume of aisles, not to mention products, is designed to make you feel that you will be the most inept of parents if you don't make sure you have everything before the baby gets here. They even give you a "registry checklist" once you sign up just to make sure you don't forget all of the items you don't really need.



It was funny that parents with kids could tell how very green we were while we registered. We must have looked a little like freshmen on their first day of college because more than one person offered advice on certain products that they had tried and what they did not like. Strollers, baby monitors, bottle brushes. People have quite the opinion! Not that we didn't appreciate it, because we did, but it was just kind of funny. So many strangers in the store offered up their opinion that it started to make me think that advising expectant parents must be some type of rite of passage for the parents of toddlers, or maybe they just remember how bewildering the aisles of paraphernalia can be. While I'm on the subject, I have to mention the characters who try to convince you to get something else AFTER you've already decided what you like and want. ("Now, don't you think you'd like this?") These people, unfortunately, are not limited to the strangers in the store. I think I may have mentioned this already, but people have quite the opinion!



By the end of walking through the store that first day out, I was contracting! I literally had to stop and sit on the bottom rung of a ladder (the fact that there is even a ladder in the store should tell you that it's too big) for a few minutes to let things calm down. Whether it was from the stress of making all the decisions we made or just from the three hours of being on my feet nonstop, I'll never know. I have made several trips back to the store and have even made a few online additions because there were just too many things too think about in one trip. Every time I walk back into that store, I start to contract again. I can't explain it.



All rambling aside, I'm a little bit torn between wanting the latest and greatest for ourselves and our kid and suspecting that the whole baby industry is pretty much a racket. I saw so many little items that looked like they could make those everyday, tedious tasks much easier, not too mention a little more fun. The reality, though, is that 20 years ago 75% of that stuff didn't even exist, so obviously parents have survived without it. One of my baby books even gives a list of about 15-20 things that it calls "essential" items for baby. That's quite a difference from the 150+ items that my registry checklist says I need. Regardless, I easily fell into the trap that the superstore created for me, because knowing what was essential vs. nonessential was not enough to keep me from going crazy with my registry scanner.



Let's face it: I'm a sucker.