Chris and I decided to start our baby registry today. What an undertaking! The list of "essentials" is about three hundred items long, and you have to choose accessories for each individual large item on the list. We decided to look at some of the bigger items today: crib, pack and play, stroller, car seats, etc. Easy enough, right? Well, as if choosing a crib isn't difficult enough (the difficulty, in my opinion, being in trying to find the difference between the $400 model and the $200 model), you have to figure out the stuff that goes INTO the crib- the sheets, the "sheet-savers," the bumpers (not just for bowling anymore!), the mattress pads, and the mattress itself. Perhaps I'm a moron, but I just assumed the crib came with a mattress. Of course, I was wrong. You pick out the crib and then you have to wander over to the two aisles filled with baby mattresses, and this is where things get really ridiculous. Crib mattresses range from about $80-$250, and I can't tell a difference between any of them. They're soft, they go in a crib, why is there more than one to choose from? And why does the Serta crib mattress come with a TWENTY year warranty? As Chris put it, "Are we really going to use this mattress for twenty years? Like, is our kid going to come home late after being out drinking with his friends and we're going to be so mad that we yell at him to go upstairs and get into his crib?" Ludicrous. And, as Chris also said, "No baby of mine is sleeping on a $200 mattress." I couldn't agree more.

So much of this stuff seems overpriced and unnecessary. When we got home, I went online to the baby store website and looked over the list of "registry essentials" again. After I determined I didn't have six hours to devote to the "essentials," I clicked over to another section designed to make the registry process simple based on what kind of mom I expected to be. The category that came close to fitting me was "Working Mom," but then I looked at the overpriced garbage "Working Mom" registered for and was immediately irritated. My category simply wasn't listed. My category would have been "Mom On A Budget That Doesn't Want A Lot of Useless Crap Taking Up A Lot of Space And I Hate To Say This But the Baby's Not Going to Know The Difference Anyway." I guess my category wouldn't be a huge profit-maker for the store. But they don't even have the consideration to list my category or issue an extreme basics version of their ten page "essentials" list. I'm so glad that when I was in the store I laughed so hard that I choked while drinking water and ended up gagging and spitting out a mouthful of said water all over the floor. That really showed them.