The last several weekends have been a blur of activity. Several hours of breastfeeding classes, followed by trips hither and yon to seemingly every baby store in the Greater Atlanta Metro area. There is just so much to buy in preparation for a baby, and the military-industrial complex (by that, I mean Babies-R-Us) makes you think you need to buy two of everything in their stores. But if Baby Trotz arrived tomorrow, we’d be just about ready – just need to buy the 600 diapers the books suggest we have on hand at the outset. I’m most excited about the gadgets (read the extended entry) and the print we selected for the nursery. We’re going with an Animal/Zoo theme, and this retro/mod print from Carousel Designs is cute without being annoying. What do you think?
I would highly recommend you buy one book to help make pre-Baby shopping more economical, sensible, and less stressful. Baby Bargains is a godsend. These folks break it all down, and make sense of it all. We’ve also relied heavily on my friends Hart & Cella’s ‘What to Buy for Baby‘ list. It’s been a great reference, too. We bought a lot of our gear at a great local store – The Baby’s Room. The owner’s son is a Red Sox/Patriots fanatic, so we could at least talk sports while doing the baby shopping. The store was littered with ‘Red Sox Nation Crib Specials’ and ‘Patriots Dynasty Glider Sets.’ Hilarious.
Anyway, we’ve filled in a great many of the essentials.
Crib – Pali Denise in Cognac, made from European Beechwood. Single drop-side, with a drawer beneath. Simple, clean lines, and it didn’t break the bank.
Glider – A super deal on a combo glider/ottoman from Best Chairs for a few hundred less than Dutalier offers for theirs.
Baby Monitor – What a freaking disappointment. This was the one ‘baby gadget’ I was sure I’d have a blast researching. Guess what – most of them suck, apparently, using 49MHz frequencies. Even the ‘high-end’ ones running in the 900MHz band are not encrypted or trunked. Even a basic walkie-talkie you can buy at Galyans has these features. There are some new models offering 2.4Ghz communications – great, so I can listen to my baby in between squeals and pops from my Wi-Fi network at home. We tried a Fisher Price Sound N Lights Monitor with Dual Receivers, but the staic was horrendous, no matter which of the generous TWO channels we tried using. That one went back to the store, and we took home the Sony Baby Call Nursery Monitor. Not imaginatively named, but this little baby works at 900Mhz, and has 27 channels. The static is non-existent, but it still peeves me that there is no better tech than this. Sure, I might setup an iSight on a long firewire cable from the home office next door to the nursery, and I could route that to a VNC client on my Treo or something, but that seems like a lot of trouble. Sorry, I had to rant about that one.
Stroller – Based on several friends suggestions, we went with the 2004 Zooper zStreet stroller. We’ve heard some anecdotal stories about the 2005 zStreets having some problems, but nothing but raves for the 2003. We found this one from liquidbaby on eBay, and at $99, we can try it and see how well it works.
Car Seat – We settled on the affordable and highly rated Graco Snugride from Target in the ‘Kentshire’ pattern. It’s funny – every store that carries these Snugrides have them in different colors. Boutiques get two or three, Babies-r-Us another set, and Target yet another. This simple design should be fine until the little critter outgrows it. It snaps into the Zooper without too much fuss.
Bassinet/Playpen – We’d held off on getting one of these, as we thought we might borrow a friend’s bassinet. She’s lent hers to another friend, and considering we’re all for saving steps walking to another room while the baby is a still a newborn, we went for what all the books and Consumer Reports call the favorite – the Graco Pack and Play in Clarion print from Babies-r-Us. Of course – same pattern issues here. Babies-r-Us has their patterns, Target others, etc. But we liked this one. You may think it looks like vomit. But hey, that’s only one of many organic compounds we expect to see on this thing.