Baby Product Showcase Showdown

The Boy left for E3 this morning before 0600. I wanted to have breakfast with him before he left since I couldn't have breakfast with him yesterday due to the whole fasting thing. I'm tired, but it's not because of the nap monster.

Finding a Bjorn for the Boy made me jealous that he has a new baby-related toy and I don't, so I actively researched (aka, surfed the 'net) slings, wraps, pouches, and other types of carriers this week. The variety is bewildering. Some of them sound like fruity drinks - the mei tai? Some of them look like you need a Boy Scout badge in knot-tying to get the kid secured, or that you should have been raised as an Indian woman with many saris to be able to get it on.

I've decided on a pouch-style carrier for ease of use. (Part of having a baby is becoming inoculated against the cutesy-wootsy naming crapola that babies seem to inspire.) For your browsing pleasure: right now, the Peanut Shell is winning on the basis of the less complicated sizing; I might consider a Hotsling later once the kid is out and I am no longer increasing in size. The doula who has been coming to our birth classes showed us a Adjustable Fleece Kangaroo Karrier that looked great but maybe it's too warm for August. Their web site has mixed messages about ordering ahead of time versus not ordering ahead of time. They get bonus points for acknowledging that pregnant people like to buy stuff for the baby ahead of time and will allow you to return it after the kid's born (as long as it's not covered in puke or poop), so maybe I'll reward that with my business.

Other baby product research: The next big purchase will be a Pack-and-Play portable playpen with bassinet and changing table. Since I did not take notes Sunday when Mistah C rattled and shook all the units on display in the baby superstore, I cannot give you a specific model to look at. It won't be an Evenflo or an oval-shaped one.

Btw, we are increasingly disturbed that nobody else seems to be road-testing the models in the store. We saw three couples on Sunday with their little scanner gun and all of them seemed to pick a playpen on the basis of looks. We take the item off the little display shelf, shake it like mad, try to take it apart and put it back together again. That seems like a no-brainer when purchasing an item your child is going to sleep in. Nobody else even touched the stupid things; it looked like they were selecting on color: brown plaid, sage green toile, or bright blocks of primary colors?

Maybe we're just anal. I have yet to find my people in a baby superstore. They're probably at home whittling their own cribs from their own home-grown lumber and weaving their own crib sheets from their organically-fed free-range sheep's wool to avoid feeding the baby consumer machine. This is California, you know.