Prepping For Baby

Paul and I have been trying to get things ready for the baby. We still have a ways to go, but we know she will be here before we know it so we must prepare. Time goes by so quickly!

So, I guess it's the "in" thing to register for baby gifts. Everyone at work keeps asking me where Paul and I are registered. I guess some of the people I work with are giving me a baby shower later on in my pregnancy. I thought that was pretty darn nice of them. I wasn't really expecting anything like that because all of our family is in other states.

I've never registered for anything. I know people do it for weddings sometimes. I have a friend who is getting married on Saturday who is registered at 4 different stores! With an invitation list of over 200, I hope they get all that their little hearts desire. When Paul and I were married we just asked that people give us gift cards or cash if they wanted to give us anything since we'd be driving to Tennessee that night. It worked out pretty well. We didn't even think about registering anywhere. We did just fine with one pan and one bowl for the first year or so of our marriage.

So Paul and I have spent the last couple of weekends registering at Babies r Us and Target. Babies R Us is pretty cool because they give you a list of things that they think you will need. Of course, half of those things really AREN'T necessary to raise a baby child (I like to call Madeline my little "baby child" sometimes cause it's fun to say and life is all about having fun) so you have to distinguish what you REALLY do actually need. That can be hard when you have never had a baby before.

Then, they give you that scanner gun. Something inside of you just goes crazy. It is so fun to shoot at the price tag. Paul was in charge of that cause it was a party for him and I like to see him smile. It got sort of annoying though cause he would start shooting at anything I would touch or say "that's cute" to. The nice thing is, you can go back and tweek your list... add or delete stuff. When Paul started talking about scanning in a flat screen TV I knew we were done.

We laughed for a long time about that one.

There are a lot of things on our lists right now that we will probably get ourselves because they're kind of expensive. We just added them because we wanted to be able to come back and reference them. So the lists are not really perfect yet, but we are getting there.

At this point all we really have baby-wise is a couple of outfits we got at Walmart for $1 and some really cute clothes my mom sent us. I have all of my old stuffed animals in Madeline's room. Now we just have to decide on a crib. Cribs are pretty expensive but I think we can find a pretty nice one and a changing table/dresser that we will be able to use with all of our children.

Oh, I did buy a book on Saturday. Many of you have probably read this book before. It's called "Love You Forever" By: Robert Munsch.



I saw it again a couple of weekends ago when I was going to a baby shower for a friend of mine. I arrived at the restaurant early so I decided to spend some time in the bookstore across the street. I went to the children's book section and began looking at all the wonderful children's books they have.

If I were a little kid I would LOVE to go to this place and sit on the tiny little benches surrounded by all the colorful pictures and books everywhere and read all day long. I enjoyed it thouroughly as an adult! I found Love You Forever and started reading it. I started to cry. I stood there, alone in the children's section of a bookstore and bawled my head off because this book is so funny and cute.

Anyway, so I took Paul to the bookstore this past Saturday to show it to him and we sat on a tiny little bench and read it together. I began crying again. So, there we sat, me crying, Paul teary-eyed because I was crying - he would never admit it. We bought the book. It will be one of many little Madeline and future children will read.

You know, one really cool thing about Tennessee is a program Dolly Parton started called Imagination Library. She sends a brand new age appropriate book to every child under the age of 5yrs in our county if you register for it. We are really excited to sign Madeline up for the program once she is born.