Baby Registry

I’m thinking about making this an unofficial baby week..I have a few things I wanted to write about, and it just makes sense to do it all at once than to spread it out.  Because if I spread stuff out, I forget.  Seriously.  It’s a disease.  So here’s the first in my baby week posts.

I’d like to go out on a limb here and say that registering for baby stuff is so much more fun than registering for wedding stuff.  And I have a few reasons to support my hypothesis.

1.  There is less pressure to pick the “perfect” item.  When we got married, those gifts were going to last a long time.  The dishes, the pots, the pans, the decorations, the towels—all of the things you register for when you get married are things that last.  I can walk into the kitchen or home of any woman who has been married for any amount of time and be shown the items that were wedding gifts.  That’s a lot of pressure on a spoon or a plate or whatever.  If I’m going to use a piece of silverware for the next whatever number of years, I have to like the way it feels in my hand.  Will I still like the style of these dishes six years from now?  Is this something we both enjoy or is it really more about me.  With baby stuff, that pressure doesn’t exist.  The towels, the bottles, the gear, all of that will be used for a season and then we’ll move on.  There’s no sense of permanency with baby stuff.   I don’t have to worry about liking it and using it for years and years. 

2. The whole process is simpler.  You’re in one area of a store instead of all over.  At Target, we were in one very small department that was packed with everything we needed.  It wasn’t like wedding registering where you go from one section to the next.  I guess if we had gone to Babies R Us, this wouldn’t have applied.  We would have still had to trek the whole store there…but that place stresses me out and I don’t want to go there, so there was no way we were registering there.

3. Target gives you a pretty bag with coupons and samples.  Fun times.

4. Andy and I know a little more about each other now…and our registering styles.  I know that he can’t be left alone or he’ll scan everything in sight, and he knows that I take  a crazy long time to make a decision.  We’re good with that.  He spins circles in the aisle (kidding…I don’t honestly know what he was doing) while I make a decision…then he scans it for me.

5. We didn’t need that much stuff.  When we got married, we had next to nothing.  We needed a lot of things to make a lot of rooms work…bedding, dishes, towels, utensils, and a whole lot of other stuff.  Here we are just getting ready for one little guy who will have one little room.  We didn’t need nearly the volume of stuff we did last time, so the whole process was so much simpler.

6.  We registered at Target and online on Amazon.  So we only had one store we went inside.  So simple, so easy, so nice. We made our whole in store trip in one night and in less than one hour.  I have a few little things to add, but it will be less than twenty minutes for all that.  I did the Amazon registry from the comfort of our sofa while Oliver tried to drop a toy on the keyboard.  Couldn’t have been easier (unless Oliver had left me alone….that would have been the easiest).

And those are my reasons for loving baby registries more than wedding registries (though I will admit—I’m super excited to NEVER have to do this again :)).