CREATING A BABY REGISTRY: Tips from Parents Who Wish They’d Known Better (Part 1 of 7)

We're all working together to put our bad registry decisions behind us.

We're all working together to put our bad registry decisions behind us.

Baby Registry Hindsight is 20/20
When my husband and I set out to create a baby registry, two things became apparent:

  • We had no idea what we needed.
  • We were in way over our heads with this whole baby thing (we already knew that, but attempting to create a registry magnified that realization by an infinite degree).

Trips to Buy Buy Baby and Babies R Us (R.I.P.) helped us get an idea of what was out there, but with way more aisles than there were people on our baby shower invite list, the sheer volume was overwhelming. We had to go to each store multiple times before we finished our list, and each trip was more unpleasant than the previous. 20 kinds of diapers, 42 types of bottles and what felt like 10,000 strollers and car seats?

It was just too much. And the fact remains, we didn’t really understand what we needed – and what questions we should be asking – until it was too late.

So I decided to put together a list of questions to consider when compiling a registry. It’s by no means comprehensive; rather, all it does is capture a few key variables we wished we’d considered prior to baby’s arrival. It would have made those first few months of parenthood easier, cheaper and – most importantly – less stressful.

I’m giving each topic its own post, so you can skip to whichever one(s) you need.  If you have any questions about anything you see here – or you'd like to see me cover an entirely different topic – please leave a note in the comments.

GETTING STARTED

MYSTERY MUST-HAVES: ESSENTIALS WE HAD NO IDEA WE NEEDED

THE NOT-SO-ESSENTIALS: THINGS WE GOT BUT LATER REALIZED WE DIDN’T NEED

CAR SEATS & STROLLERS

THE DIAPER DILEMMA 

BOTTLE BASICS