Maybe it's because I'm pregnant and don't have a ton of energy. Or maybe I'm just not a registry person. After all, we never really did a wedding registry. We had a super small one that we did online. We never went to a store to pick things out. Either way, setting up a baby registry was a nightmare for me!
I'd been putting it off for a while. For some reason it didn't sound fun. Even though I love shopping and I love babies, something about the registry made me want to avoid it at all costs. It was Tom who finally convinced me to go. Convinced, begged.. same difference.
So off we went one Saturday. We picked Babies R Us because... well I'm not sure why other than it was close by and our friends had used it recently. It seemed easy? That should have been my first hint that it would be anything but.
I'll skip the almost hour it took to go through a tutorial, fill out endless paperwork (I was waiting for her to hand me a pregnancy test to verify I was in fact pregnant) and finally get our registry gun, but things only got more painful from there. "Start with the big items like the cribs. That's easier," the person working there told us. Really? Is it??
We made our way back to the cribs. There must have been 40 of them to choose from, and they ranged in price from "Holy cow, that's for a CRIB?" to "THERE IS NO FREAKING WAY WE'RE PAYING THAT FOR SOMETHING OUR BABY IS GOING TO PUKE ON!" Actually at first I was looking at a couple and saw the price and went, wow that's expensive, but okay... and then I realized I was looking at the price for BEDDING. Of which a baby can only use the flat sheet for the first year+ of their lives. It was the most expensive sheet I've ever seen. Then I saw the price of the crib which was 5x that and about fainted.
One of these cribs is $699.99, one of these cribs is $569.99...
...and one of these cribs is only $499.99, but...
...all the reviews say the paint chips off and ends up in your baby's mouth.
Of course they all looked the exact same too, so I had no clue how to choose one. I think I finally said, I like grey - go find the cheapest grey one that won't kill our baby, and left Tom to pick. Awesome, one thing down. Did I mention that Tom had a 6 page list of items listed as "must have," "need to have," and "fine, you don't need to buy this if you're cool with your baby suffocating." I'm pretty sure I said no to at least half the list, and I still feel like we looked at a million things and were in there for hours. (Well that last part is true, because we were in there for hours).
Everything we looked at seemed to be more of the same. There were 50 options, all had the same safety ratings, all functioned near identical, and were in a similar price range. There was no logical way to pick. Half the time I'd point the registry gun at something random and say "eh good enough" and half the time I'd just beg Tom to pick something. I'm pretty sure he was having fun while I thought it was the worst thing you could ever do to me.
I finally got some entertainment in the form of baby strollers. Have you ever tried to work one of those things!? I'm not talking pushing them. That's easy, and I've mastered that part of it. I'm talking the "super easy, one hand push button folding and unfolding" of these torture devices.
There was one stroller we just couldn't figure out. We had gotten it collapsed but could not for the life of us put it back together. Tom kept saying "I just need to force it, I can get it" and I was hissing at him "DO NOT FORCE IT. For the love of god if you break this stroller I'm leaving you here. I am 100% sure you DO. NOT. FORCE IT!" It got so bad other parents stopped and were like "um do you guys need help? You look like you need help." Turns out there's a second latch that if you didn't know it was there, you'd be stuck just like us. I'm sure it's one of those things that once you've used a stroller a few times they're actually super easy and helpful. If, however, it's your first time? Good luck to you.
There were actually some strollers that even after we figured out the "trick," I still could not collapse them. Try as I might, they were not designed for me. I'm pretty sure it's like most child proof things that are actually harder for the adults to figure out than the kids. Hopefully we'll have a little genius baby that can fold and unfold their own stroller.
In the end, I'm super glad we have a registry because it's easy to keep track of what we still need. And there are even a few things on there that I'm very excited about. But boy was it a pain to get it all ready. And yet, it's probably the easiest parenting decision we'll have to make this year!
By the way, if you happen to have a small human yourself, and know of some life saving thing that you would not have made it through the first year without... HELP ME! Especially if it's not already on our registry?