Babies 'R Us and the Silvestro Scar

Last weekend Lisa and I went to the high temple of infant consumerism, Babies 'R Us. For those of you who have never laid eyes on this bastion of American culture, I will try to describe it for you. Imagine a huge box store chock full of all of the cutest baby stuff you can imagine. There are gadgets and contraptions for holding your baby safely in every position imaginable while he/she is sleeping, being cleaned, and listlessly carted from one place to another. There's baby exercise equipment, decorations, toys, and all the baby clothes you can imagine. It's meant to both get you to buy cute little things for your baby, while at the same time guilt-ing you into getting things that are, in my opinion, really unnecessary.

Our goal was to finalize the items on our baby registry, or at least figure out a few of the things we really need to have. So we went there armed with our inch thick Consumer Reports guide to baby stuff. When we got there we printed out the current sorry state of our baby registry, as well as the registry of our friends Marcus and Amy, who are expecting their first baby a month before we are. Marcus and Amy had recently gone to Babies 'R Us and spent many hours walking around with the consumer reports book, figuring out the best contraptions for their baby. I won't embarrass them by saying how long their registry is, but let's just say they were extremely thorough.....  

Lisa and I had a very different strategy. It was called "Let's see what Marcus and Amy have on their registry." We trust that they are intelligent people who did their homework, so we blatantly plagiarized from them. This technique saved both our time and our sanity. In fact, I don't think we opened the consumer reports book once while we were in the store.

I have a small scar on my upper lip that I got when I was a toddler. I've been told that I got this scar when my Mom went out for a little while, leaving me alone with my Dad. I don't know if he wasn't watching me closely, or if after 4 other kids was much more relaxed, but I ran into a table and cut myself. I don't think that my Mom was too happy when she got home that day, but Bill Cosby would have been proud at the "genius" of my Dad. Bill believes that fathers act incompetent so they are not asked to do things all the time. My Dad may have qualified in this case.

The funny thing is, my Dad has a nearly identical scar on his upper lip. While I'm not sure to this day if this scar is really due to an accident or a bizarre Silvestro male ritual, I can make the claim that I never would have received this scar if my parents had put baby bumpers on their furniture. Oh wait, they probably didn't have baby bumpers when I was a kid. How could I have even survived childhood without such a basic necessity? According to what Babies 'R Us would have you believe, I would be a delinquent parent if I didn't get such safety items for my child.

Now I know that technology has advanced, and things like car seats are much safer than when I was a child, but it seems to me that a lot of these items are meant to save us from a lack of intelligence and common sense as much as they are meant to save our babies from an accident. Do I think that I need all this stuff for my baby? No. But I'll probably buy it anyways.