Last month Pattie discussed some of the things she has encountered as we anxiously and excitedly await the arrival of our impending bundle of joy/all night alarm clock.

This month, it's my turn.

Those of you who have kids know this, but child-raising technology has advanced leaps and bounds over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As parents, you are not expected merely to love your children, feed them, clothe them, keep them from harm, and pass on your values and knowledge. Rather, you are expected to obtain a ton of items that will, allegedly, make the lives of you and your child more convenient, more fulfilling, happier, and healthier, and possibly give you whiter teeth and fuller hair, although I'm less sure about those last two.

This is not really a great situation for us, because Pattie and I are big planners. We research, cross check, cross reference, cross out, and so on until we're cross eyed, at which point we either a) act on our brilliantly-thought-out plan or b) get thrown for a loop by some crazy, insignificant last-minute detail -- I'll let you guess which happens more often. So, once the new year rolled around and we realized we're at about three months to go and counting, we realized it was time to roll up our sleeves and start planning.

My God.

We tried to start with the big stuff, like the crib. The good news is, cribs are very heavily regulated, because pretty much everyone recognizes that the place where an incredibly fragile baby is going to sleep ought to be just about the safest damn piece of furniture ever built, so that makes the process a little easier. However, there is no shortage of crib options, and the price of a good crib can go from $250 to $600 or even higher. You can get cribs that convert to toddler beds or even into headboards for twin beds; we hope to reuse the crib down the road, so we weren't interested in those options. You also can get cribs that match a certain style of furniture, which means you have to decide if you're going to one set of furniture for the nursery and then replace that when the baby grows up and gets a 'kid's room,' or if you're going to pick a furniture style from the start and add to it as the child's needs change.

And of course there's a whole different set of issues to consider in selecting other furniture, which isn't quite as heavily regulated. This is where you, as the expectant parent, must dig deep into your memory for all the harebrained stunts you pulled as a child and try to imagine how your kid will try to improve upon them, and then try to select furniture that will stand up to these shenanigans. Also, while it seems like with cribs there is a wide disparity in price but relatively little in quality, the opposite seemed to hold true with the other furniture -- dresser/hutch combinations all seemed to clock in at around the $1000 mark, even though some seemed very solid and others were basically pre-fab put-it-together-yourself items. What to buy, and from whom to buy it, and for how long to plan to keep it after we bought it? We had diagrams and maybe even flowcharts at this point, and eventually decided to buy a dresser and hutch that the baby will be able to keep using; we'll add a bed and a desk down the line. This decision, of course, raised the question of whether we should buy the crib that matched the dresser.

At this point I have to give kudos to the staff at Karl's in Philadelphia, the folks from whom we planned to order the dresser. I called up the person who'd been helping us and said, "What's the difference between the $550 crib from the same furniture line as the dresser, and a $300 crib I can get from the local Babies R Us?" I liked this salesperson and this store a great deal, since they're knowledgeable, they're incredibly nice, and they have a terrific selection, and to be honest I wanted her to sell me on the $550 crib -- I wanted to give her the business. She came right out and said, "Really the only difference is that the crib will match the rest of the furniture, and if that's not important to you, go for the other crib." Fortunately, we were able to buy a less expensive crib from Karl's, and everyone went home happy.

Until we realized that we had only scratched the surface. Sure, the baby had a place to sleep now, but what about feeding? What about traveling? What about sheets for the crib we had just painstakingly selected? We got a couple checklists from various stores, and then put our own together and started looking for answers. We spent an hour or two just researching the first item -- bottles, for crying out loud. Do we want the ones with the liners, or do we want the plain bottles? If we want the plain bottles, do we want an angled one or a straight one? If we want the liners, do we want bags or a hard plastic liner? I looked through reviews on Amazon, but for every parent who raved about a certain bottle, another claimed that it always spilled and her baby had horrible gas.

To take a break from the bottle imbroglio, I looked ahead on one of the checklists, and saw 'Sassy Seat.' That was the breaking point. "What the devil is a Sassy Seat?" I asked whomever I could find on Instant Messenger, none of whom were parents. "And do I need one?" As it turns out, the Sassy Seat is apparently a seat manufactured by the Sassy company, which is designed as a high chair that attaches itself to the table and allows the child to sit with everyone else, and use whatever food and other implements are within reach to transform the table into a work of modern art. I'm not sure how that brand name became a generic term, but then I've discovered that the baby industry is always throwing new terms at us. 'Playpen' is apparently no longer in vogue, having been replaced by 'pack-n-play' or, even better, 'playard,' even though an artificial structure that keeps the child in a relatively small confined space reminds me a heck of a lot more of a 'pen' than a 'yard,' but I didn't know what a Sassy Seat was, so clearly no one wants my input on this issue. Which is just as well, because we still are trying to find a diaper bag that would not be out of place during a night on the town, which means I have to hurry up and shop for the formal burp cloths. Catch you later.