Get Ready

In your 8th month of pregnancy, people who already know you're pregnant will ask, "Are you ready?" (If people didn't know you were pregnant, you get the standards: due date? boy or girl? name?) "Ready" can mean different things, and it may be difficult to determine exactly what they want to know. It's a pretty safe bet that the meaning of "ready" depends on who's asking.

Who's asking...	What "Are you ready?" means...
Grandparents-to-be	Is there anything else we can buy for the nursery? There appear to be pockets of air not filled with toys.
Friends-recently-parents	Have you bought diapers? Don't say we didn't warn you.
Friends-with-kids	Have you slept as much as humanly possible? Seriously, don't say we didn't warn you.
Your obstetrician	Do you really, really understand that this is going to be painful, messy, and exhausting? Don't make me explain it again, but seriously, if you say I didn't warn you I can have my license revoked.
Other medical professionals	Has your OB described what's going to happen to you? If you really think breathing is going to help with all that pain, you are truly kidding yourself.
Other Moms-to-be	Do you want Kicky McBladderKicker out of your body as much as I do? Who's ready to reclaim their uterus? Who's with me?

For dads, "ready" means pretty much only one thing: You've purchased gear, assembled it, installed batteries, and know how it works. You have to explain to mom how to open the stroller, click the car seat into place, and operate the swing. You also have to swear to God that the crib won't fall apart and that even though you built the glider, you don't have "dibs" on it.

This blog-post is about the major gear we've acquired, either through spending hard-earned money or compelling very nice, very generous people to spend hard-earned money.

This is our car seat. It is, in many ways, the most important piece of equipment because the hospital will not let you leave unless you have one installed and inspected. There are quite a few choices in car seat. Ours was ultimately driven by our stroller. We got the same brand of car seat as stroller—Peg Perego—because it's easy to fit the one into the other. In the first six months of the kid's life, you want to install the baby into car seat and hope you never ever have to remove him. In the future, babies will be born pre-installed into car seats.

Our stroller decision was tough. Ultimately, we decided that we wanted lots of flexibility without sacrificing portability. The Peg Perego Venizia weighs a little more than your average stroller, but not by much, and it gives us a reversible handle, a large compartment underneath, and a highly adjustable seat. It should last us a few years.

By far the hardest decision was the Pack-n-Play. This is the modern term for a playpen, a piece of equipment which has come a long way since you and I were kids. Playpens now double as bassinets and often come with a changing table built-in. They're extremely portable, so they're meant to travel with the family. We'll be using the Pack-n-Play in our bedroom for the first few months as the boy becomes acclimated to breast feeding. Deciding upon our particular Pack-n-Play was tough because it's difficult to find one that's reasonably priced, fully-featured, and comes in decent colors. Many of the companies making strollers and car seats make Pack-n-Plays. Strollers and car seats come in a nice range of colors, but they must be using overstocked fabric on the playpens because they come in only one color: Hideous Plaid.

Finally, the swing was pretty much a no-brainer. I suspect many new parents, like us, get as many features in their swing as possible. They worry that the one feature their swing doesn't have is the just the one that puts the baby to sleep. Ours rocks in two ways, has a rotating mobile and three different sound settings. It doesn't vibrate, but his bouncy seat and Pack-n-Play do, so we have that option covered if, for the boy, the swing don't mean a thing.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of equipment. There's also the bouncy seat, the baby monitor, the sling for carrying the baby, the changing pad, the diaper bag, the diaper disposal unit, the mobile, the play mat, and the breast feeding pillow (which I happily discovered is not a pillow that breast feeds). But this covers the major ones, at least for the first year of life. I shudder to imagine what it will be like buying the kid's first car.

So, when people ask us if we're ready, we look at each other knowingly. You can have all the equipment in the world and still not be prepared for the dramatic life-shift, the upheaval of everything that's good and holy, the complete topsy-turviness of the world. But if there's a tool or device that softens the blow, that makes the chaos slightly less, well, chaotic, I'm pretty sure we now own it, or can at least fashion it MacGuyver-style.