A Lose-Lose Situation

If you could just gouge my eyeballs out with a melon baller and shove lit dynamite in the empty sockets, I would greatly appreciate it.

I am in the registry/planning the nursery/can't put off buying things any longer phase of the pregnancy. Luckily this combines some of my favorite things like shopping for crap I have no interest in, spending ridiculous amounts of money for things that will last about a year and completely disassembling my house to find new places for the crap we've been storing in the "office/one day will be a nursery/mostly a place we hide the stuff we don't feel like putting away" room.

So I'm in a real healthy place right now.

One would think at least the registry part would be fun to do. "Look! You can go to a website, click things you need and other people buy it and send it to you."

I'm on hour 876 of attempting to create my registry. That's how well registering is going for me.

The one consistent piece of advice I have gotten from friends already in the mommy world is: Don't buy too much stuff. You don't use most of it. And less shopping is one piece of advice I whole-heartedly can get behind.

So I had a brilliant plan. BRILLIANT, I tell you!

I sent out an email to my closest girlfriends asking the following three questions:

1. What is the one item you couldn't possibly live without?
2. What handful of items were the biggest waste of money that you never use?
3. What do I have to, can't live without, simply must know when I'm setting up the nursery?

How streamlined of me, I thought foolishly. I'm going to have the world's most efficient nursery and can use the rest of the registry for things like All-Clad pans and Le Creuset pots.

Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

I received a 10-page missive back on the things I would be needing, the girlfriends' reviews of each item, about 10 billion contradictions on what I really need and don't need and links to 50 katrillion sites I should definitely check out before making any decisions.

OK...I'm playing this up for funny for sure. Well it really included all those things, but their information was beyond helpful. Unfortunately, I've fallen down the rabbit's hole of research and can't get out.

The process goes like this:

• Jen opens up Amazon to start registering for each and every item listed on the 10-page document
• First item: Car seat
• About to register for the 'approved by all moms' car seat when 10 emails come in about how car seat laws have just changed and now kids need to be in a rear-facing car seat until they are 35 years old.
• Old car seat recommendations no longer applies.
• Spend 3 hours reading every Amazon review on car seats.
• Decide I still can't make an informed decision so go register for Consumer Reports to read their 1,000 reviews on car seats.
• Ultimately determine no car seat is safe enough, comfortable enough, easy enough, car seat-y enough.
• Go back to original car seat recommended and register for the one made to hold a 35 year-old.

I wish I was making this up.

10 pages of this.

And this is just the registry...I STILL need to buy baby furniture. (Which I like to make infinitely more impossible by insisting it be eco-friendly AND cute--the nerve of me.)

We're at the point, where I'm considering leaving the dog crate in the nursery and using that as a 3-in-1 crib, changing table, storage unit.