Road Trip, Baby!

Sunday afternoon I went on a small roadd trip to Babies-R-Us with the wife and Miss K, a good friend of ours. Now, K is very cool. She is about my wife's age and they have been friends for years. She was really excited to escort us as we went to Babies-R-Us to register for gifts. See, she went through the whole baby makin' thing just a scant three years ago, so she knows the drill. My son just turned 9 and I didn't do the whole baby shower thing the first time around, so this was new even to me.

K has kindly offered to donate a TON of stuff (quite literally) to us for the new bundle o' joy, but apparently there were a few things that we didn't have for which we needed to register. So, K picked us up in her little Beamer SUV and off we went.

That's her driving below.

The simple act of walking into Babies-R-Us (BRU from here on out, folks) is quite overwhelming. The sheer enormity of crap you can buy there is mind boggling. So, we went to the nice lady at the Baby Register counter and the Mrs. told her "we" were there to register. She started to pull out two sets of forms for us to fill out, thinking that both the Mrs. and K were there to do the registration tango. When we told her it was just for the Mrs., she said "Oh, you said 'we'," and took the other form set back. K and I decided she was thinking that the Mrs. and K were the actual couple and I was just the gay friend tagging along to help because, in reality, I had donated my sperm to their cause, and dammit, I was bound and determined to have my gay lovechild raised right!

The lady then rambled off a bunch of stuff that she had obviously memorized from years of being on the job. As she did this, she kept rubbing her forehead as if the actual effort of doing this was causing her excrutiating pain. But, she never wavered in her delivery and spit it all out flawlessly. Then, she handed over the Gun.

This is the part I'd been secretly waiting for.

The Mrs. handed it to me and off we went. Now, the Gun, you see, is a bar code scanner. Very cool thing. I felt powerful with and scared by it all at once. Any bar code within my reach was now able to be tagged, scanned, and added to our registry. And man, we went crazy. Did I mention BRU has a bunch of crap? Wow!

The problem is that once you get into the process, you can't freakin' stop. It's addictive. I was scanning for shit we didn't even need. I wasn't paying for it, so I didn't care. And, the place has SO MUCH STUFF FOR EVERY POSSIBLE SITUATION, that you start to think, "Hmm...maybe I ought to get one of those just in case..." The damn store makes you paranoid.

So, about two hours later with 83 items on our baby registry (and this may not sound like a lot, but we only registered for the stuff we knew we'd need...like I mentioned before, K is supplying us with a ton of stuff), we were pooped. The Mrs. needed, and even K and myself, seasoned veterans, were bushed. So, we paid for the some of the stuff K bought and skeedaddled to Chili's for dinner, where I settled into a nice margarita, chips, and queso.

A margarita never tasted so good.

-la