What is all this crap?

The Baby Registry process isn't easy.  To me, it's like socially acceptable begging.  The overwhelming part of registering as new parents is that baby items fall into one of two categories.  1) Things you have no idea if you need (or even what they are sometimes) or 2) things that you know you need, but have no idea to differentiate between the thousand different options.                                                  
                                                            

As to the first category, the problem is both the sheer volume of baby products, multiplied by our fear of not getting the right stuff.  How the heck would we know if we need a harness system to hang our kid from if we have to go to the bathroom in a public place?  Or will we be able, as inexperienced as we are, be able to suck our kids snot on our own or will we need assistance?  It's tough to know what situations you will find yourself in. The one thing we have going for us is the large number of currently pregnant women we know, which allows us to cheat and copy off of their registry lists.  The only flaw in this plan is that only first time parents have showers (except for strange exceptions that cause certain members of my family to fly into uncontrollable rages, but even then the greedy shower-mongers usually don't register the second time around).  So it's a giant loop of the blind leading the unprepared, with the only winners being the people smart enough to make baby crap and sell it at a 4,000% mark up.
                                                    

As to the second category, even if you know what you need, it's not easy to register for.  Rachel and I, having read all of the baby books ever written, realized that it might be a good idea to register for baby bottles.  So trudging through Babies R Us, or "The 7th Circle of Hell" as it is more commonly called by guys, I was pretty confident that we could find the bottle section, scan a random bar code, and move on.  Little did I know that it would be a 4 hour debate.  I knew I was in trouble when Rachel asked "which bottles do you think are best?"  Unfortunately, I had a tough time remembering back to the time when I used bottles, let alone the pro's and con's of different brands.  So we started reading the labels, which is a complete waste of time because although our country allegedly has truth in advertising laws, there must be a loophole for baby products as every single description made it sound as if said bottle descended straight from baby Jesus' mouth right to aisle 7.  I was really hoping for labels that were truthful, such as "this bottle is overpriced crap that will break the first time its dropped" or "putting this bottle in the microwave may cause leprosy".  Since our philosophy is "if it's not dishwasher safe, it's dirty" we really didn't have much to go on. (RIP Mitch Hedberg).  So then we were stuck with trying to register for a bottle among a sea of seemingly identical bottles based solely on price.  You don't want to register for the cheap stuff because other people will buy it for you, but you don't want to register for the most expensive stuff because other people will buy it for you, but you don't want to make it look like you and your kid are snobs based on bottle selection.                        
                                              

So what did we register for?  I have no idea, but it better be dishwasher safe.