Today Tammy and I truly realized how completely and totally clueless we are in some respects to our upcoming adventure in parenthood. The day started with what seemed like a simple task. We needed to go and register for the upcoming baby shower. Simple enough task. We registered for our wedding and that was actually kind of fun, I got to shoot things with the scanner and she got to shop a lot.

Tammy had done some research on this to figure out what should be on our list, what the necessities were, etc. All-in-all this should have been a pretty simple process. Our first stop was at USA Baby. Tammy showed me the car seat and stroller combination that she liked and I thought it looked great too. If the rest of the day was going to be like this it would be a breeze! Evaluate the different products, give it a tug, see which one feels better and move on. The rest of the trip to USA Baby wasn’t worthwhile and we decided not to register there, not enough registry worthy stuff.

We then proceeded to the mega-mart of baby goodness that is Babies-R-Us. We stopped at the registry desk and got set-up. They had a scanner gun for me so I could have fun shooting things with the little red line. This is how shopping should be all the time. You get to carry a device and scan each item you want. Seriously, let’s get rid of the shopping carts and just walk around with scanners. Wireless transmission of each item as we scan it and then pick up a box at the checkout! Anyway, that’s another post. 🙂

We proceeded to start building the registry list and walked over to the thing that any moron knows you need if you are going to have a baby, bottles! We stood looking at the “wall of bottles” from a variety of companies. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. We picked up different bottles and looked them over. Fifteen minutes passed. We wondered if we wanted the bottles with the plastic bags in them or not. Twenty minutes passed. Do you want bottles with a bend in it? Do you need a sanitizer? What about a bottle warmer? What is the bend in the bottle even for?

This is the point where we realized we were really, hopelessly lost. These books list a ton of things that you “need”. Do you really need all this stuff? It seems crazy! Babies were born and prospered plenty before the invention of all these plastic items. What do you need? What is purely optional? What is a poor sales job trying to simply extract money from your wallet? Aargh!

We spent about 2 hours or more building a list of items. We left in a state of despair wondering where the baby sleeps when you go to a hotel? How and where is a bassinet used? Do you need the bottles with a bend in them?

I’m sure we’ll figure all of this out but it sure left us in a state of confusion. A quick call to a friend left a recommendation to get a copy of Baby Bargains. We proceeded directly to Barnes & Noble and purchased the book. Hopefully we will be able to get some wisdom from it…