The Baby Industrial Complex

So, Sunday Geoff and I made our first journey ever to Babies R Us. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

I had already kind of overwhelmed myself trying to research some baby equipment online. There's a lot of it, and everyone has an opinion on what's best and what you shouldn't bother with. We're planning to not go nuts with extraneous baby stuff (we don't have the space for it, as usual), and we're hoping to take a buy-it-as-we-need-it approach, but of course some of it you have to buy ahead of time--they won't let you leave the hospital without a proper car seat, for instance. So there you are, trying to figure out the difference between the Evenflo Discovery and the Britax Marathon. (Car seats and space shuttles evidently draw from the same pool of names.) We still don't have it figured out, but my initial frustration is starting to wane.

Somehow it seems harder picking out stuff for a baby-to-be, though. You're basically making choices for the comfort of a family member you've never even met. Where will he or she sleep best? How fast will he or she outgrow little newborn stuff? We'll have to just guess.

So, I knew that Babies R Us was out there, and I knew it was some kind of big-box store crammed with baby stuff, so I figured we'd better make a visit and see what we're dealing with. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't as huge as I'd envisioned (more the size of a Best Buy than, say, a Target) and that the store's not huge because you need a hundred pieces of large equipment for your baby, but you need more like ten, and each of those ten has like a hundred options.

So I'm glad we went without the intention of buying anything. It was actually kind of helpful to see all the equipment laid out where you could touch it. I got to point out the wonders of gliders and Pack N Plays and vibrating baby bouncers to Geoff, and I was glad he seemed interested in the backpack-type baby carriers.

So it was a nice, no-pressure visit full of pointing and "what do you think of this one?" and I think next time we go back we'll be able to get down to business and start making some choices. I'm glad we have 24 weeks left, so we don't have to try to figure it all out at once.