My mama told me, you better shop around….

My mom and I went baby shopping this weekend at Babies R Us---the warehouse of baby crap. It was pretty fun if not a bit overwhelming. Fran didn’t come as he was getting his hair cut—not short and sexy though, as he is still growing his lustrous Michael Bolton locks for Halloween--- 3 months from now…Bah!

Times have sure changed since I was a kid. I’m pretty sure when I was a baby, parents just bought a wicker basket and some diaper pins to prepare. Now-a-days you have to basically set up a home gym for baby. You have the bouncy seats, the pack-n-plays, the 76 stroller varieties, the baby-packers, and my favorite…the giant stationary baby circus seats (don’t know what theses gizmos are actually called---but they look important.)

Picking car seats, playpens, high chairs, etc., is crazy-hard. My brain just keeps thinking “kay, what crib is going to be the least likely to kill my baby…hmmm”. I have no clue where to start. I have to trust that I won’t buy the exact crib that will be recalled in 8 months, or the highchair that collapses on its inhabitants. My pregnancy brain prevents my logic functions from working and Trude is in soon-to-be grandma world so we weren’t a very effective pair. I didn’t purchase anything as I could not, for the life of me, make a single decision. We were completely distracted by all things baby, and the vastness of the baby-crap warehouse confused us. We needed to get the hell out, and fast! but when we were ready to go we tried to exit through the entrance. We seriously stood there waiting for the automatic doors to open for like 8 minutes before we realized it. Sheesh.

So if it is that difficult for me to find fucking crib bedding, imagine how difficult it is finding a daycare. After figuring in our incomes and the cost of daycare these days (for babies plan on between 750 and 1000 per month) we’ve decided it’s worth it for me to work. Because Fran’s schedule is kind of strange, he’ll be home during the days a lot, which is fantastic. The problem is, if you need a daycare, you pay for it fulltime. It sucks but it’s a fact of life. So even though the Martian will spend about 70 hours a month at daycare, we’ll pay for more than twice that. We could get a nanny for less, which we’ll probably do when we buy a house….IF we can find someone worth hiring who will work around our schedule…Bah!

Tomorrow is my first scheduled tour of a daycare downtown. If I walk in and experience any of the following, I’ll walk out:
Smell poo or pee
See dirty babies
See wandering Ninos
Hear incessant crying
See rotting foods
See dirty toys
See lazy workers
Smell poo or pee
Smell poo or pee
OR
Smell poo or pee