January 17, 2015 - Journey to Babies 'R' Us

When I was little, I definitely did not want to grow up.  This, of course, meant that I was most certainly a Toys 'R' Us kid.  I was also a KB Toys fan.  The closest Toys 'R' Us was near the Maine Mall in Portland, but as it was outside of the actual mall itself this meant that we rarely went there (adding to its allure). There was a Toy Works at the Cooks Corner Mall, which was much closer to our home in Bath, and that was a necessary stop whenever we went there.

My parents set up a system of "buy days and look days."  There were far more look days, which meant that when we went to the store we were only looking, we wouldn't be getting anything.  We had to be well behaved, and if we threw a tantrum or whined then that meant that the next buy day would be pushed back for the foreseeable future.

But every once in awhile (we would never know when they would come), if we had been really good and really well behaved, my brother and I would get a "buy day."  And this meant that when we went to the store, my parents would buy us one thing that we wanted (within reason).  This system was great for many reasons.  1) It got rid of impulse buying, because my parents wouldn't cave every time we would say "I want this" or "I want that."  Instead, after multiple look days, the ONE thing that had remained in our brains throughout was ours. 2) It saved my folks a lot of money.  And 3) It kept Lukas and I on our toes, because who knows if something we did would prevent a "buy day" from happening.  It's a system that I want too put in to place once Nugget gets here.

I say all of this because I want to illustrate how familiar I was with toy stores growing up.  What I was not familiar with, which is something that until yesterday remained a mystery to me, were the stores that came before Toys 'R' Us.  I'm talking, of course, about Babies 'R' Us.  So yesterday, Elizabeth and I steeled ourselves and entered the Thunderdome...

Two men enter, one man leaves...

The first thing I thought was "I've got to do a lot more to research."  It's one thing to do a Google search and see that there are hundreds of options for car seats.  It's quite the other to see this...

  

 

Aisles upon aisles of car seats.  Car seat bases, upright car seats, rear facing seats, seats that clip in to entire travel systems, seats that look as if they are replicas of the Apollo space couches.

We also go to see some interesting products, things that I had never seen before.  Things like this:

It's called a Snuggle Nest, and it's a small enclosed pad that lets your baby sleep right with you and your partner in the bed.  Skipping over any comments on limits or boundaries, I would like to instead imagine what these parents look like when being woken from the Snuggle Nest at 2am...

And how about this much needed product:

This is a luxury whirlpool, bubble spa, and shower.  Again, babies are wearing bags of poop...does luxury really ever play in to their lives?


The best thing I saw, however, in the entire store was this:

It was a pregnant woman carrying a large list of things to buy. And her dead eyed husband followed dutifully behind with an cart that was increasingly getting overloaded by stuff.  This scene played out several times while we were walking through the store.  I laughed a little to myself at first, and then I realized something...

....pretty soon, that's going to be me...