Registry Woes

SWAG

So I registered on a whim the other day.

I was eager to check something out a Buy Buy Baby and figured that while I was there, I might as well sign up and scan my stroller and car seat.

Fast forward three hours.

Holy moly.  I really want to be concise and thoughtful with my registry, but that proved to be a challenge.  I know I can (and, despite all of my research, will have to) do some exchanging as I learn "what works and what doesn't," but I'd like to minimize the run-around as much as possible.

Thankfully I really only need practical things since our nursery's planned out, but I was really overwhelmed at the decisions I had to make. I've been gathering opinions and advice from the "moms" in my life (and Amazon) over the past few months and thought I would be prepared.  I wasn't.

The craziest thing to me is that I felt like there were right and wrong decisions, not just matters of opinion, and I didn't know what to do.  I don't mind trying things out and having to exchange them if they aren't great, but it seems like a lot of baby products aren't returnable.  Really, when it comes to the "gear" side of having a baby, I'm pretty clueless.  I can determine if I like the way something looks, but as to whether or not something works, I have no idea!  And what's even more confusing is that everyone seems to have strong, VARYING experiences on a lot of products, so there's no clear-cut winners.  Yikes!

The second craziest thing is that in the course of three hours, my registry still isn't done, mostly due to indecision. For example, take pacifiers.  My mom never used them, so I'm not even sure that I'll need them.  I figured I better register for some, though, because everyone I know uses them like baby crack.  BUT they all swear by different brands...which made me confused about which ones I should choose. So I registered for a couple of types--maybe a total of six pacifiers overall.  But I know that if I use pacifiers, I'll need like a million of them, which makes me want to register for more... Needless to say, I had a lot more fun registering for pacifier clips (a totally opinion-based decision!) than I did for pacifiers themselves. :)

Since Ryan dodged a bullet with the first round of registering, he's agreed to come with me for the much-needed second round next week.  It'll be good to have some back up and someone to share the painful experience with.  And thank you to all of my lovely friends for the advice and offers to registry-edit once we're done; we'll need it!

One final thought: The only consistent piece of advice we've gotten from all of our mom-friends is that the baby will decide what she likes, and really no matter what we register for, she'll survive.  Whew. That's the important thing, right? :)