Before I begin this post about baby registries, I would like to make an announcement: ONE! WEEK! LEFT! Thank you.

Registries are most useful for the first baby, because there is so much crap you need/want all at once. But first-baby registries tend to be…silly. It’s no one’s fault: you’re pregnant for the first time and you go into a big baby store and what are you going to do? Basically click the “one of everything, please” button on the scanner. Tiny leather slippers for $29.99? Click! $5.00 Johnson’s baby shampoo that you could get at Target for $2.50? Click! In utero flashcard set? Click! $24.99 receiving blanket that is exactly like the pack-of-4-for-$7.99 type except that it’s rolled up and tied with a natural canvas bow? Click! White bibs? Click!

I think we can use many of our wedding registry questions here. For example, what did you put on your baby registry that you later used as an example to mock your own naivete? What did you register for that turned out to be pure genius, whether you knew it would be or not?

Registry or no, what did you get a ton of? What did you not get any of? Everyone told us not to buy anything in newborn sizes because we’d get inundated with it, but apparently everyone had heard about that because we got no newborn stuff and a ton of things in sizes like 18-24 months and 2T, which I then had to find a storage system for, and which then often turned out to be the wrong season when the baby finally hit that size. We also got four million hand-knitted baby blankets. Four million, seriously.

Did you find that parents gave you better, more practical gifts than non-parents? I found that some of my non-parent friends wanted to give me gifts long after it was too late. One non-parent friend visited when the baby was a month old, and she complained that I already had a car seat–she’d wanted to buy me the car seat. Um…I needed it…earlier than this–but thanks for the thought.

Did you get anything dreadful? We got a set of religious children’s books for a religion we don’t belong to, but I wouldn’t call that “dreadful,” just presumptuous and annoying. I am trying to think back, but I don’t think we got anything that was “homemade toilet paper holder” bad.

What were your best baby presents? I’m thinking here mostly of things you didn’t register for but that surprised you with their usefulness or sweetness. My brother gave my first baby a copy of a book he and I both loved to scraps as children–he’d had to search online and pay a million dollars for a copy, because it was long since out of print. One of Paul’s co-workers gave us a Baby Morgan mini-blankie, which Rob still sleeps with, and in fact we bought four more of them as spares–and good thing we did, too, because the whole company went out of business and you can’t even get them anymore.

Gift certificates were especially awesome for a baby present, because we didn’t really know what we’d need. We got the basics (crib, car seat) ourselves, but we were looking at everything else and thinking, “Well, do we need a frontpack? Do we need a bouncy seat? A mobile? A swing? A playgym?” We didn’t know. Gift certificates let us go out later and buy what we had figured out we wanted.

And what about non-first babies? Did you register? Did you get anywhere near as many presents? We got presents from what seemed like the entire world for our first baby, and then a little smattering for the second–but that seemed appropriate. It’s almost like the difference between a first wedding (“set up a household” level of gifts, even if you’ve been living on your own for years and years) and a non-first wedding (“She can still use the crock-pot we gave her for the first one, even if she’s cooking for a different man” level of gifts). First-baby gifts are to get you set up with all the stuff you need to move from non-parents to parents; non-first-baby gifts are mostly from people who love to shop for baby stuff.

A final note on baby gifts. Two of you have emailed me to ask if I have a baby registry or if you can send me a gift for the new baby. You are so, so nice, and also pretty and skinny and you have great hair and everyone secretly copies your fashion choices. But this is our fifth baby, and Paul thinks we already have twice as much baby stuff as we should (hello, it was on clearance), and besides, I can’t give away my secret identity: even Paul doesn’t know my real name isn’t Swistle. But I am touched, and I thank you.

Oh, man, I loved the wedding present stories! The regifts with the original to/from card still in the boxes! The yard sale crap that cost more than a nice new present would have cost! The fake wooden book with a gold Jesus on it! The homemade toilet paper holder! The guess-a-size lingerie! The painted ice skate with a fake bird in it! Three-foot-long wall hangings of The Last Supper! The book helpfully advising you to consult the Lord before resorting to the divorce you’ll inevitably want! The suggestion that the colors you’ve registered for can’t be what you had in mind! Ha ha ha ha ha ha wheeeeeeeeeeeze!

It’s nice to know that people still get a ton of candy dishes, vases, and unusable silver/crystal. My mom caught a case of Registry Envy from my cousin, and is now fretting about all the silver/crystal she and my dad got almost forty years ago and how much better it would have been if they could have registered for other things. Presumably things in avocado green and harvest gold covered with little smiley faces and daisies, things that would at this point be even worse than the crystal and silver, and would in any case be broken or worn out by now. Just saying.

I’ve heard that thing about knives being a bad gift. I heard the “it cuts your love” thing for weddings, and that for non-wedding situations it means you want to sever a relationship. (What I usually do is stop returning calls, rather than dropping big bucks on a set of knives and hoping they get the expensive hint—but to each her own.) The year after I heard about the knife-gift symbolism, I gave my mother-in-law a set of knives for Christmas. She really did need them; the symbolism was merely a bonus. In fact, it seems like knives would make a nice wedding gift for a couple you thought shouldn’t be getting married. You’d have the satisfaction of the symbolism, as I did with my mother-in-law, and yet you’d be getting them a genuinely nice gift so you’d look like a nice person with good taste. Wicked.

Those of you who wish you had matched flatware, allow me to direct your attention to the Amazon.com kitchen sale, which is on until May 28th and includes some bitchin’ flatware sets. I think my favorite is the Oneida Banbury service for 12 for $49.99 down from $180.00, with free shipping–but it’s hard not to be tempted by the Reed & Barton service for 8: what little girl doesn’t dream of her first game-bird-themed flatware set?

So. Onward. Two people have suggested that the next discussion be about baby registries. Babies and registries? You barely need to touch my wrist, let alone twist my arm. I’ll do a post on that soon, so be thinking about the topic and composing your comments.

Hi, and welcome to Let Your Kids Watch TV All Morning Because You’re Too Wired And Want To Talk Online! Day!

Yesterday, our mail carrier delivered a package…to the side of the road. It was a large but lightweight package, and he left it next to our mailbox, in the dirt by the side of the road. I don’t think they’re supposed to do that, are they? He’s not our usual carrier; our usual carrier always brings the packages to the porch. I was almost mad enough to call the post office and complain, but then I was like, “Do I really want to follow through on this?,” and my answer to myself was, “No, I want to see if there is any fudge left.” So I went out to the road and brought in the package before someone could steal it, and then I ate the rest of the fudge.

Did you catch the Amazon.com toy sale? It’s a little frustrating because so many of the things in the sale category are not, in fact, on sale (apparently because they have only certain quantities available at the sale price, and then the item reverts to its usual price but somehow stays in the sale category–VERY ANNOYING), but if you’re all wired up and in the mood to shop, it’s the perfect opportunity to browse pages and pages of nothing you’re interested in. I did find a bunch of little handheld toys for Rob and William to play with at the hospital while they’re waiting for the baby to be born, and maybe those toys will even arrive before I go to the hospital, but it is not likely.

Yesterday I had my pre-op appointment with the OB. My PRE-OP. Because there are only EIGHT DAYS LEFT UNTIL MY OP. The OB and I discussed things such as whether I can have the epidural out earlier than usual, since I hate that “dead weight from the ribs down” feeling, and also, if you can imagine, that “tube in my spine which could leave me permanently paralyzed if I move wrong” feeling. I wanted to ask about this before, but I didn’t want to be one of those patients who thinks she knows better than the entire medical community. Finally I thought of a good way to ask about it: instead of asking if I “could” have the epidural out early, I asked if it “worked” to have the epidural out early. See, then he can be Expert Doctor, and perhaps then he won’t feel like showing me how much pain I could theoretically be in. He said that after the surgery was over, he could either do a “walking epidural” (the nummy narcotic part of the recipe without the numbing part), or he could take the epidural out entirely and do oral medication (again, that would be the nummy narcotics). Furthermore, it turned out he’s a big fan of shorter epidurals, because then the patient can move around sooner and that’s good for circulation and healing, so now he loves me even more! Which is good, because when someone is going to cut me open with a scalpel, I like as much love and goodwill in the room as possible.

The house was freezing this morning (I left the windows open all night), but I hate to turn on the heat when later it’s going to be overly warm in here and I’ll be puffing up. So William and I baked muffins, which raised the temperature a couple degrees of pumpkin-spicy goodness. Highly recommended tactic. And now the freezer is seriously out of room for muffins. Really: no more muffins.

I paid bills today, and it was exciting to think that the next time these bills are due, the baby will be here. Also, I paid a few of the smaller, more annoying ones a few months ahead, so that I wouldn’t have to mess with them soon after the baby was born. For example, we have this one credit card that we only use for a small monthly automatic billing thing, and I should really switch that to another card but I never feel like messing with it. And so this little bill arrives each month, and sometimes I put it aside because it’s a pain, and it has an unusually short time between bill date and due date, and so sometimes I end up having a heart attack because it’s overdue and the late fee is more than double the entire amount of the bill. Anyway, I paid that for the next four months, so screw you, tiny little pain-in-the-butt bill!

You guys are fulfilling my wildest dreams with this wedding present discussion. It is such a relief to have people to talk about these things with, and it is a relief to Paul, too, I’m sure.

I started writing comments on your comments, but there were too many comments I wanted to comment on and I gave up. But I especially loved the idea some of you mentioned, to take something from the registry and make it more personal: adding recipes to cookware, etc. I LOVE that idea, and I wish I had consulted you creative people before sending off two cake pans in a box. At the very least I could have put in a cake mix! Ooh, or I could have gotten them the little cake-decorating kit I like so much! Well, next time.

The story of the KitchenAid mixer that was fulfilled from the registry but then never showed up–that haunts me. What could have happened to it? Did it just get checked “fulfilled” by total accident? Did someone buy it but then change their mind and keep it themselves? Did they have it shipped and it got lost in the mail and they’re still miffed about not getting a thank-you note? Terrible to think of!

Oh, and I love the idea of registering with a charity! You know how at the end of a lot of registries you can also select a gift card option, with a little pull-down menu so people can specify how expensive a gift card? It would be great to have something similar at the end of a registry, with one or two charities.

All right, so we have discussed registries, now let’s talk about non-registry-related wedding present stuff.

When my parents got married, they got many toasters. Many toasters. I can’t remember how many, that’s why I’m saying “many” twice like that, to communicate that there were more toasters than they could possibly use, but without getting corrected by my parents in the comments section.

When we got married, people joked about how many toasters we’d get, but we didn’t get a single toaster. What we got a lot of were sets of cloth placemats with coordinating cloth napkins and napkin rings. I can’t remember how many we got, but it was lots. So many, it got to be increasingly funny every time we opened another set. They were beautiful, and such a good gift idea, but I’m saying that was our “ha ha toasters.”

So first what I want to know is what was YOUR toasters? What did you get lots of, and what did you get none of?

Next, what did you get that you didn’t expect and wouldn’t have asked for, but it turned out to be awesome? Someone gave us a set of Chicago Cutlery steak knives, and we never eat steak so I thought we wouldn’t use the knives, but they’re perfect for non-steak cutting jobs, and they came in a handy little holder that sits right on the counter, and I use them every single day. They’re one of our very best gifts, and I never would have known I wanted them.

Another surprising and pleasing gift was a big box of Christmas stuff, mostly an assortment of ornaments. Our wedding was a couple of months before Christmas, and we didn’t have much for a Christmas tree, so it was fun to get a “starter set” like that.

Next, what did you get that was a total failure, or really comically bad? Someone gave us an enormous (the size of a poster) cross-stitch with our names and our wedding date and clearly a whole lot of work done on the border–and there were two errors. My name was spelled wrong, and the date of our wedding was wrong. Ha ha ha ha ha! I mean, what do you do with that?

We also received a kit of wedding materials (book, inspirational plaque, daily devotional, etc.) put out by a well-known religious figure of a religion we don’t belong to. Thereafter, we received regular mailings from this religious group, and when I say we strongly disagree with the political and social stances of this group, I am understating to keep things pleasant. I am an expert at writing thank-you notes, but this one was my greatest challenge.

Oh dear, that ends things on a negative note, doesn’t it? Let’s reflect instead on the funny cross-stitch! Ha ha ha! And now tell me all your wedding present stories: your toasters and your cloth napkins, your steak knives and your Christmas ornaments, your cross-stitches and your thank-you-note challenges.

I am having the kind of night where, after being sleepy all day, I am lying awake in the dark thinking about (1) my chipped filling, (2) the upcoming birth of this baby and whether the name we’ve chosen is no good and we need to start all over from scratch, and (3) how for millions of years people have lain awake in the dark just like this, worrying all their worries, thinking all the fretful things that keep a person awake at night–and now all those people are dead.

My cousin is getting married next month, and I have been having fun looking at his registry. I love registries. Not only do I love peering at the things someone else likes and wants, I love choosing what I’m going to buy. I weigh each option for symbolism and practicality. Bonus points are given for items I own and like, or approve of in general, or want for myself. Points are docked for items that I am almost certain they are never going to use, or items I suspect they would choose a much much cheaper version of if they were paying for the items themselves. Shopping and knowing they’ll like it and judgmental thoughts! It’s win-win-win!

Now that I’ve chosen my cousin’s gift (I got them the cake pans I want for myself), I feel sad. All that’s left now is the endless revisiting of their registry to see what other people have bought, and that fails to satisfy. I want more: more wedding present talk, more registry talk.

I have two main things I’d like to discuss. I’m worried that if I put both into the same post, some people will answer one and some will answer the other, and we won’t get a deeply satisfying discussion going. And so my plan is to separate the two topics: we keep everything straight that way, and I get twice as much talk about wedding presents.

The first topic is wedding registries. If you had one, what are you glad you registered for, and what do you now look back on as foolish? What do you wish you’d registered for? Did you have a whole bunch of registries, or just one? Did you get most of what you registered for, or just a smattering? What approximate percentage of gift-givers used your registry, and what approximate percentage didn’t? What do you think are the most important items to register for?

Next up will be the non-registry aspects of wedding presents, such as what did you get ten of, what did you get none of, what did you get that you didn’t expect, etc. But for now, stick with registry issues and decisions, happy and sad.

This is the sight that caused Paul to say–very, very gently–that he thought we now had…enough muffins in the freezer.

There are twelve muffins in each bag. Eleven bags.

Later, Paul asked if I’d like him to go outside and gather up some twigs and soft bits of yarn for me, or if I had enough already.

I am getting seriously difficult to live with. It is mostly general crabbiness and general being sick of pregnancy, but it is a far-reaching thing, encompassing tone of voice and quality of complaints. Last night I was. . .I think “weeping and railing” is the phrase I want here.

It started with a tooth. I hate going to the dentist, but a year ago I went. I had four fillings done. We don’t have dental insurance, so including the exam and the x-rays, this was no small commitment. One year later, my tooth is chipping away around one of the fillings. What this says to me, in my current frame of mind is:

1. Dentists deliberately do bad work so that you will need to return.
2. They will keep doing more and more work until you have no teeth/money left.
3. If I hadn’t gone last year, I wouldn’t have this problem now.
4. My teeth will all be gone by the time I’m 40. And I’ll have spent tens of thousands of dollars on them by then.
5. I’ll have to get dentures, and I won’t be able to eat anything I want anymore.
6. THEN I’ll miss biting into an apple, even though I have a whole pile of apples in the fridge right now that I cut up if I want to eat them. Later I’ll think, “Why oh WHY didn’t I bite into apples when I could??”
7. Dental work costs so much, it’s a luxury service. It’s unfair of them to promote it as a basic essential.
8. Oh my god, how are we going to afford dental work for a family of seven?
9. I wish we had dental insurance.
10. Even if we did, it wouldn’t cover enough.
11. Life sucks.
12. I’m going to have to make an appointment and just shut up and pay them whatever they tell me to, but for when? Before the baby? After the baby?
13. What if I wait, and then it gets suddenly way worse when I’m, say, in the hospital?
14. Is it starting to hurt now? I THINK IT’S STARTING TO HURT NOW!
15. How are we going to pay for this, considering Paul just had $3000 of dental work done, and now we’ll have a $1000 hospital copay because of the stupid insurance increase?
16. Etc.

Anyway. This morning I called and made an appointment. For four days after the baby is born. And now I’m thinking I should ask them to do work on my BRAIN while I have my head under a bright light anyway. What was I thinking? I’m barely going to be WALKING at that point. Sure, Paul will be home that week, which is why I made the appointment for then, but we’ll have to load all five children into the minivan so he can drive me a mile to the dentist’s office, and then he’ll have to do it again to pick me up.

Oh, so I was saying that it was tooth agitations that set me off last night. It was right before bedtime, so I thought, “I won’t think about the tooth now. There’s no point. It will only keep me awake.” So I tried to think about other things. And what I thought about was how I should really get up the courage to ask the OB/anesthesiologist about having the epidural taken out the night of the c-section rather than mid-day the next day, because I hate not being able to move, but I’m probably too chicken to argue about it, and maybe I’d be wrong about that idea anyway and would be writhing in pain in the middle of the night with the doctor shrugging and saying, “Well, you insisted.” And about how the only thing that has worked for the pain afterwards is Perc0cet, but last time I got a rash and so they said I can’t take it anymore, but now what will I take? Vic0din and Tylen0l 4 and Demer0l have all failed me. And then I thought about how we need to get the oil changed in the minivan, like, two thousand miles ago, and how Paul and Rob need haircuts, and about how we need to install the infant car seat rather than just having the box taking up half the minivan. And I thought about how mad I was at the Target automated refill system, which left a message on our answering machine WHILE I WAS AT TARGET PICKING UP A PRESCRIPTION to tell me I had a prescription I needed to pick up within 3 days or they’d return it to stock, and how because of HIPAA they can’t tell me over the phone what prescription it is or anything, and Target is 20 minutes away and I really don’t want to go twice this week, and CRAP. And about that program we watched on TV that showed scarily blank-faced children staring at a TV screen as the voice-over explained that by letting our children watch TV and play video games we were bringing them up to relate only to technology and not to other people.

Paul is good at times like this. Just for starters, he doesn’t argue with a pregnant woman on a tear. He doesn’t say in an exasperated voice, “Well, why don’t you just do something about it instead of complaining and fretting?” He says, about the dentist, “Don’t worry. Make the appointment. It will be fine. This is what money is for.” And if I refuse to be comforted, and I burst into tears and go on about everything we’ve spent money on in the last year, and how it means we have NONE LEFT, he doesn’t say I’m being irrational, or say, “Well, if you hadn’t spent money on ____,” or think I’m attacking his earning power. He says, “I know,” understandingly not patronizingly, and then says, “Oh, did I tell you the cute thing Edward did earlier?” and tells five funny/cute child stories in a row. He says, “Why don’t you close your eyes and think about how not sleepy you are.” He tidies the blankets. He lets the window stay open even though he’s freezing, because he knows I’m overheated and short of breath and the cold fresh air helps. Furthermore, last night he went to the grocery store to get some mid-week things (we are always out of milk and fruit), and he came home with not one but two pints of Dove ice cream for me, and he had to guess at the flavor I’d want because I’ve only ever bought the bars, not the pints, and he picked the flavor I would want more than any of the others.

This skill of Paul’s (not the pint-picking, but the whole “letting the storm blow over without fighting it” thing) is a good thing, because I am aware that I am becoming impossible, and that it is almost certainly because I am at full-term as of today–but that doesn’t mean I can force myself to be rational about it. And since next up is the postpartum period, it’s not as if things are going to improve anytime soon.

I want to send you over to Shauna today, because I love the topic of gift-giving and she is working it. I want to read lots of people’s answers to her questions.

Also, I meant to say about the free bone marrow registration post from the 14th: spread the word.

Also, I would like to say that I am tired of my maternity shirts. And that I have hit that point where even though it’s unlikely and not really something I should be hoping for, I keep thinking how great it would be if I went into labor and we could get this over with. I’ve only gone into labor one time, with my first pregnancy, when my water broke at 37 weeks 6 days. How come that has never happened with the other pregnancies? I always make it to my 38- or 39-week c-section date, even when I was carrying twins. That’s good, of course that’s good, and genetically lucky, and I am grateful. But.

Here is something Paul cannot master, no matter how many times we have calm and reasonable discussions about it: when to buy grapes, and how many of them to buy.

If they are awesome grapes, firm and with that frosty opaque look, and they are at a good price per pound (say, $1.29), he should buy LOTS. If they are crappy grapes, soft and with sour, already wrinkling skins, and they are at a bad price per pound (say, $2.79), he should buy NONE. Of course, there are many tricky places in between these two situations. There are awesome grapes at the high price end, and there are crappy ones at the low price end, and there are pretty good ones at the sort of high end, and there are decent ones at the sort of low end, etc.

So before he goes to the grocery store, I try to explain the continuum once again. Good grapes don’t have to be cheap, but he should buy smaller quantities as they get more expensive. Cheap grapes don’t have to be as good as expensive grapes, but we won’t eat many if they’re not good.

He comes home from the store with gross, browning, wrinkled grapes at $3.19 a pound. At least he only bought a pound and a half of them (I would not have put it past him to buy five pounds, remembering the “we eat a lot of grapes” but not having room in his brain for the “not if they suck”), but still: $5 worth of grapes? When they’re no good? That’s a lot of money on bad grapes.

If I’d done the shopping and the grapes were $3.19 a pound, I would have bought them only if they were glorious, perfect grapes–and even then, I would have bought about half a pound of them, just to tide us over; and in certain moods I would have bought not one single grape, on the principle that grapes should not be $3.19 a pound. In any case, at $3.19 a pound, anything less than perfect puts us in the No Grapes shaded area of the graph.

I realize this is a significantly more complicated situation than the “get out a fresh roll of toilet paper when the old one is getting close to being used up” one (which he has also failed to master). I don’t expect him to make exactly the same call I would make, to the dollar or to the pound, and it would be ridiculously controlling if I did, especially because sometimes he’s right where I would have been wrong: he comes home with 3 pounds of expensive grapes that turn out to be worth every single penny because of their amazing deliciousness, and in fact prove that I am in some cases overly thrifty to the point of missing out on the joys of life.

But I think that in general, he should be able to understand that “expensive” and “yucky” belong on one end of the grapes graph, and “cheap” and “perfect” belong on the other end, and that things change gradually as you move around within the range of possibilities. Balances tip. Judgments must be made. Sometimes grapes are purchased and sometimes they are not. Sometimes quantities are large and sometimes small.

Seven paragraphs on grapes? Well, I meant to tie it in with his overall inability to make shopping decisions (buying chips not on sale and from the most expensive store, buying things without even looking at prices, etc.), but I seem to have run out of steam.