I’m not sure about everyone else, but I’ve always found the registry process to be somewhat daunting. I feel incredibly self-conscious about the whole thing and am loath to “ask” for gifts. As a consumer, I completely appreciate them and love buying gifts for people that I know they want or will use. It’s mostly just my silly personal hangup..but we’ve all got those…right?
On the plus side…registering for baby things has been really fun. Who doesn’t like shopping for their baby-to-be? We finally feel like we’ve made some progress in getting our baby room in order and are feeling like we’re “ready”. Whatever that means!
One thing I’ve found though, is that registries can be deceiving. Typically, you find a store or group of stores that you like and you set up a registry. In theory, you’d expect these stores to have good quality products at fairly competitive prices. Between the usual “baby stores”, the prices seem to be reasonably on par with one another. However, I recently did a little comparison shopping for one or two items we still need and was amazed with what I found. Amazon.com had a few of the big-ticket items at over $100 less than the baby stores. That’s a BIG difference when you’re scrimping for pennies and worried about maternity leave.
Definitely take the time to comparison shop and maybe even consider the Baby Bargain’s book I mentioned in a previous post. Those pennies add up!