We've Gotta Get WHAT?

They sit you down at the nice desk with a cute little old lady who you're convinced will be handing over cookies before too long. She asks you the normal questions and gets almost teary when she starts talking about the "gift" you've been given and what an exciting time it is in your lives. She obviously has blocked out the memories of sleepless nights, incessant heartburn and persistent nausea. We smile and nod politely.

The Hubs asks for a beer. I want the gun. Let's get this party started, hunny.

Excited to begin the quest and start giving form to our new life, we make our way to the stroller and car seat section. With price tags ranging from $400 to $1k on the three and four-wheeled varieties, visions of those romantic dinners out and impromptu 3-day trips become increasingly faint, kind of like Michael J. Fox's family in the picture he references throughout Back to the Future.

Our "personal shopper" joins us with another expecting couple who seem to be as clueless as us. Face filled with holes from random piercings around his lips, nose and ears, he begins telling us what we'll "need." This includes THREE different car seats by the time the kid is 8. THREE. However, the hubs astutely discerned that we'll be able to skip one of these units if we can get BG (baby girl) to 20 lbs by the time she's one - so of course we're on a course to fatten her like fois gras before she's even born.

Then there are the strollers. You can get "jogging" strollers and "snap and goes," upright Stokke strollers and the lesser recommended Graco strollers. Regardless, he advises getting two of these bad boys too - one for the car, one for city cruising. We're stuck in this section for two hours before we can even progress to the next section. I start feeling nauseous. The hubs really wants a beer.

Then there's the baby entertainment centers. Shocking they don't come equipped with wide screen plasmas at this point, but these are undoubtedly right around the corner. This little pod will likely send your kid to outer space if you put enough quarters in it.

So we made it. We ingested enough information to require a three-hour nap at the end of the trip, and we may have emerged with a mere five items on our registry after four hours in the store, but we made it. We made it right to the restaurant down the street where the hubs shed a few tears in his beer and we consumed every bite of the most expensive items on the menu. With dessert.