Babies Cost a Lot

The past week has been kind of hectic for both me and Eric with lots of things going on at work, and of course, in life! We've both been a little bit overwhelmed by all there is to do in terms of preparing for a baby - what do we have to buy before the baby is born? how much does it cost? where are we going to store it? how far in advance to do we have to buy? and many more of those types of fun questions I'm sure every first time parent has. Being the planners and researchers that we are, we went to work trying to find answers. We started with Baby Bargains which several colleagues and acquaintances suggested. This is quite possibly the.best.book.EVER. No joke - it goes through everything you could possibly imagine from car seats, to cribs, to diaper bags to the layette it takes Consumer Report findings, plus reviews and feedback from actual parents and reviews nearly every single brand out there in every category. Then, they even make recommendations based on price, lifestyle, etc.

Eric is pretty awesome and got cracking on the research pretty much as soon as we got the book. He looked up cribs, car seats, strollers, bedding and so much more and really narrowed it down to the top brands so that I didn't have to do too much research. Now, I know that I tend to have expensive taste in things, but I had no idea how expensive some of these baby items could be until we started looking. $1000 for a crib? $250 for bedding? $800 for a stroller? Ummm I don't think so. I don't even have bedding that expensive and I'm a grown adult that can appreciate high thread count sheets! Luckily, after a little bit of digging we were able to find some very nice options that were much friendlier on the wallet. I think narrowing down our top choices to three or so per category will definitely make it less overwhelming when we set foot into the crazy baby stores, and help us not spend crazy amounts of money on things we'll never need/use (or at least not now).

We've got a fun start to this week, with tomorrow being my next OB appointment! We'll go over the results of our NT scan and find out if the doctor is going to officially change my due date. At my NT scan, the baby measuring about 2.5 weeks behind where it should have been which lead the doctor overseeing the ultrasound to suggest changing my due date from April 6 to April 23. So tomorrow I'll find out if I'm actually 13 wks 3 days or 16 wks! Also exciting news (at least for me) - I finally got to eat eggs this morning! I've been really put off by the look/smell of eggs since right around the time I left for Rwanda, but for some reason this morning after my work out, I really wanted an egg and cheese sandwich. I made one, and not only did it NOT gross me out, I thoroughly enjoyed every bite. I'm so excited I get to have one of my favorite breakfasts back:)

In other news, we finally found a boy name that we both like! We had a girl name picked out even before we got engaged, but the boy names were the ones that stumped us. I had been seeing really cute girl clothes and nursery items, and this weekend I also managed to find some really really cute boy ones. Which brings me to my next point...who wants to place bets on whether we're having a boy or a girl? In light of our upcoming appointment with the doctor, we decided to do a little polling. So far Mama Skrzypek thinks its a boy, my dad thinks its a boy, and the daddy-to-be thinks its a boy. I, on the other hand am leaning towards a girl. So what do you think? Leave a comment below and let us know! Or, if you have thoughts on how to tell before the anatomy scan, let us know:)