Monday, January 07, 2008

Part of the process

This weekend hubs and I actually went and bought a solid colored quilt for the bed in the baby's room - and we also picked out a paint color for the walls. We're getting there...slowly, but surely. Since our local weather report said it was going to be storming all weekend, we planned on hunkering down at home with a fire in the fireplace. Course it didn't actually rain on either Saturday or Sunday until late afternoon...but oh well. I am in sorting/purging mode! We took a big load of clothes to the Goodwill on Saturday - and I already have two more boxes of stuff piled by the door ready to go as well. I found myself sorting through kitchen drawers at 10pm last night because I just had that ITCH to get rid of stuff we don't need. I've become very anti-clutter lately. I suppose that must be that whole nesting thing people talk about because normally I'm not bothered much by clutter.
My sister in law reminded me this weekend that I need to get on the ball and register for baby stuff...and I groaned. I was immediately reminded of the disaster that was registering for my wedding.

See, hubs lived in the Bay area when we met. He also lived there during our entire dating and engagement, which made the whole wedding business a bit more difficult to manage. My husband is not the "just tell me when to show up" type - he was very involved in everything from color choices, to table decorations...which means that alot of things had to be decided upon over the phone or during our weekend visits. When it came time to register...we decided to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond - and we decided to do it on a Sunday while I was up north visiting him. I must first explain, that I had already been living on my own and had an apartment full of my own stuff at this point. Hubs on the other hand was new at this entire experience and was still living at home at the time (understandably so because it's so darn expensive up there). So I had to relinquish a bit of control over things in my house that I'd had control of for so long. And letting go of my control issues? not an easy thing for me...in fact, that was probably my biggest challenge when it came to us getting married and hubs moving in. I liked living alone...and I liked having my own space with my own things - all that pretty much goes out the window when you decide to get hitched...
So anyway - we went to register, which began what I believe was "our first real fight" of 2001.
Let's just say we had a hard time agreeing on much of anything, from glasses, to dishes, to towels, to sheets, to pretty much ANYTHING. His taste was completely different from mine, and vice versa. At one point, I remember sitting in the bedding section on the floor with the scanner in one hand and a completely defeated look on my face because we'd been there for 3 hours and could NOT agree on what sheets to register for. hahaha - in retrospect, of course it's completely ridiculous and unimportant now...but at the time, it really sucked. My biggest problem was that hubs was notorious for wandering off and playing with different gadgets and gizmos. I wanted to just get it DONE and get OUT - but since hubs is actually the type to give a crap about what household items we had, I was constantly having to draw him back in and reind him to pay attention to what we were doing.
The one thing he kept doing was dancing...to the music I mean, playing over the loud speaker. I would normally laugh and giggle at this aspect of him - but by hour #3, I was so sick of being in that place and so sick of us arguing and him being distracted, that the dancing was really getting on my nerves. Just as we were about to finish, I turned and asked him a question about something and he was busy bustin a move in the middle of housewares and I just flipped out..."would you QUIT dancing around and focus, so we can get F*%$ out of here!"
and he spun around and threw his hands up in the air and shouted "IF I CAN'T DANCE, I HAVE NOTHING!!!!"
Which is when I exhaustedly collapsed on the floor in a fit of laughter because THAT? was the funniest thing ever. Seriously, the best way to end such a miserable experience was for us to be laughing so hard tears were rolling down our faces in the middle of BB and B. I still tease him to this day about that, because we were both just so irritated with each other and that one little statement made all the irritation disappear....not to mention everyone in the store probably thinking he was a Broadway reject or something.
So here we are facing a baby registry and all I can think of is hubs in Babies R Us shaking his booty to the music and me getting ready to throw the scanner directly as his head. HA!
Maybe I should just let him go and pick out the stuff...so I can avoid the whole thing. Although I suspect he would find a reason to register at Best Buy and give me a million reasons why our child needs that big screen plasma tv.
By the way - here's a shirt that hubs got for Christmas from my brother and his family...how very appropriate, hee!

Sidenote: hoooly schnikes, does that ticker really say I only have 90 days left??? How is that possible? that's cuh-razy.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, you need to register pronto!

Our registering experience went SO MUCH BETTER than when we did it for the wedding. In 6 years we've grown. And yeah, the things that caused us to fight before WERE unimportant, but at the time that doesn't matter.

Anyway, this time I made sure we both ate before we went, and Bryan had a big ol' cup of coffee. Then we argreed to be there for just an hour. I could have been there all day, but it didn't have to get done rightthatveryminute so we agreed to split it up. Then he looked at me about 45 minutes in and just said, "I'm not focusing. The details are too much for me right now. Can we leave?" and I said sure because I knew if I made him stay, the shit would have hit the fan.

Know your limits.

Oh, and I did a lot of pre-registering online (stuff that you don't need to 'try out') and that cut out a lot of the overwhelming factor once we got to the store too. But when we first got there Bryan wanted to scan EVERYTHING because "I don't know what it is, but it's for our boy! He NEEDS this!" It was quite the moment I gotta say :-)

Good luck. Can't wait to hear all about it!

(longest comment ever)

Alison said...

At least theres a BRUs in Santa Maria now and you don't have to go all the way to Ventura...

"I HAVE NOTHING" - ohhhh that just gave me the big LOL in my office.

What color paint?

Anonymous said...

J and I looked on-line at all babies-r-us....they have little rating system and buyer comments on each item. Between that and consumer reports (my husbands an CR addict) we had picked out most things ahead of time on line. It made the registering process much easier and faster...

One of our first fights (after 5 years of dating) was about the kitchen knives we registered for...He literally had a temper tantrum in the middle of Macy's....