Formerly Slow, Bataan-Style Death March to Gear-Based Baby Preparation Gets Helicopter Ride In Form of Baby Shower

My baby shower was this past weekend! It was great. My mom knocked herself out finding a great space and directing all the catering herself, and the guests showed their appreciation by giving me a ton of stuff.

All of the good pictures below were taken by the incomparable Dennis Kwan (thanks Denny!), whom you should hire for your next event.

There was LOTS of food:

Lots of gifts:

WHO named this product? It's actually pretty great, but the name... yeech.

And lots of friends and family:

It was a great day. Lots of love. And, as you can see, we're now totally ready for baby.

Cribs: Jesus Christ

As I think everyone who reads this blog already knows, I'm pregnant. Hooray!

While the baby is obviously the biggest life change on the horizon, the news necessitates a few others. We're moving, for one. Brooklyn is baby-friendly, but our top-floor walk-up one-bedroom isn't. My parents have made it clear that they are ready to shower the baby with love and, more importantly, me and Dan with free child care, so we're moving to Jersey City to be closer. We signed a lease on a gorgeous, brand-new place with two bedrooms, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a dishwasher.

Apartment-hunting in the NYC area is a time-consuming drag: you kiss many a dark, poorly laid-out property located way too far from public transportation before meeting your sun-drenched prince. We looked for a little over a month before finding this place.

I expected finding an apartment to be difficult. I did not expect crib-hunting to be worse.

YOU GUYS, WHAT IS UP WITH CRIBS?!? It is a box/cage you put your baby in. There should not be a) this many options and b) this many shitty options. By shitty options, I learned in Crib Research Mode that many (most) cribs are made with medium-density fibreboard, or MDF.

MDF off-gasses low levels of fun fumes for one to five years after manufacture, including formaldehyde, so I've been looking for a crib made of solid wood that costs less than two grand. There aren't that many, but I still feel overwhelmed with options. There's a cheapie wood crib at IKEA, for instance:

But $129 is a little suspiciously cheap. 

There's no suspicion of cheapness with this beauty:

But why is it $800? Is it THAT much nicer than the IKEA crib? Is it morally permissible to spend $800 on a box/cage? I don't know! Maybe!

This one is $400, nice-looking, and solid wood, so maybe it's a good compromise:

Ugh. I don't know. I have a lot more thoughts on this but believe it or not, they're even more detailed and mind-numbing than what I've said above, so I'm going to sign off and try to take a nap at my desk.