We need a baby WHAT?

Well, we have mostly accomplished a long overdue task this weekend. We finally registered for the billions of baby goods that a modern day baby apparently cannot survive without. I thought that it was a challenge to register for our wedding, but I stand corrected. Jake and I are bumbling around the store, amidst the craze of holiday shoppers and crying infants, me with my ever growing belly at times knocking things off the shelves. I made the mistake of bringing in my purse, which is constantly needing to be held by Jake or set down somewhere to investigate some infant contraption, following by brief lapses of panic that I can't remember where I set it down.

Then on top of all this, we are attempted to pick out, amongst seemingly endless choices, the exact perfect items for our new baby (who will likely just poop and vomit all over these shiny new things). How do you pick out a good stroller? Great question, I ask. Should you get the "travel system" variety, or a jogging stroller, or an umbrella stroller, or a universal base for your carseat of choice? Or should you go with a hybrid of a pseudo-light-weight travel system, but oh wait, you can only use that up to a certain age... Well how do these things fold up? How much do they weigh? Will they fit in my trunk? Is the sunshade long enough? That costs HOW much? And that's only the stroller. We then got to repeat this process for pretty much every large and small item - bathtubs, playpens, carseats, high chairs, bottles, breast pumps, first aid kits... All the while I am carrying around my handy new mommy baby stuff book, flipping through the index...hmm...it looks like they don't comment on humidifiers in here...

This all gets even better when the guy at Babies R Us tells me that the best solution for all of our problems is for me to just get a new car. Ouch. Sorry sir, I love the MINI Cooper too much, and quite frankly, the baby is already in love with it as well. I'll take the smaller stroller.

Jake was a good sport through it all. Doing the manly duty of carrying the zapper gun, cursing under his breath when the bar code wouldn't scan. Figuring out how to fold up contraptions that should fold, release contraptions that should release, informing me of poor product design similarly to when we were shopping for a kitchen table (see, look how it shakes...) In the end, I think our baby will survive it all. She's put up with little sleep and long work hours for most of her in-utero existence, and I'm sure she'll find a way to manage if the sippy cup isn't ideal.

All that being said, the task is pretty much done, save for a few things we needed to come home and "research". We can now move onto other tasks, such as decorating the house for Christmas (which first involves taking down the Halloween decorations...) This is a picture of me this weekend at 29 weeks. The belly is getting bigger and rounder! We can't wait to meet the baby, but I think I will also miss carrying her with me on a daily basis, always getting a chuckle when she punches me in the middle of rounds, as if to say "enough mom, they've heard enough"...