Okay, do you know what else no one has really come right out and said to us?  That there are a LOT of things you need to have to prepare for a baby.  It's always implied, but no one has actually said it straight up.  

I say this as someone who has refined our Baby Stuff We Need list to exclude anything that seems like overkill, and as someone who is shopping on eBay to save money on baby trappings.  But when you get right down to it, baby fingernail clippers seem pretty necessary, as do diapers, diaper rash lotion, nipple cream (a concept that is still utterly foreign to me when not mentioned within the context of "fun sex" ), a car seat/carrier thinger, a baby monitor, a small-sized blanket, a place for baby to sleep and oh yeah - clothes. 

And please, about baby clothes! Who knew that they are not at all like normal-person clothes in that a baby does not wear one outfit per day like a normal person.  Apparently real-life babies go through something like 5 outfits per day. Furthermore, I have recently learned that real-life babies do not wear "outfits" in the normal-person or Gap kids catalog sense of the term. Instead, for the first few months they mostly hang around in your home wearing t-shirts, like the perpetually unemployed. 

Any male family members who read my blog should read no further.  Consider yourselves warned.

Girlfriends and female family members who have had children?  You have seriously stumbled in your  duties.

The following information is what I, a college educated, curious, 30-something year-old woman, recently learned about my own breasts and their role in breastfeeding an infant:

This is NOT how a breastfeeding infant receives milk.

This is how a breastfeeding infant receives milk.

What other secrets have you people been hiding from me?  You are all in BIG trouble.

Thus far, our having a baby has been more of a concept than a reality, but that is changing as my belly continues to grow.  For a long time we thought: we’ll have a baby, and sure, things will change, but we’re both competent adults, and there are books and new parent classes and, well, we’ll figure it out.

I heard myself saying this to various family members over the holidays and noticed that my delivery had this sort of weird, perky confidence.  I think it’s because so far our daughter has been incredibly low maintenance, being in-utero and all. Right now it’s easy to assign all sorts of magnanimous attributes to her person (Oh, she’ll be a cheerful baby, good at math, and also deeply culturally aware). Any kind of child care or schooling arrangement is easy to imagine. Imagine if…I worked full time and Fabulous Husband stayed home with her. Imagine if…we could negotiate flexible work arrangements so we wouldn’t have to have a stranger care for our daughter. Imagine if...I stopped working until she went to school. When you play “imagine if”, all endings are happy and there are no real consequences.&nbs;

Over the holidays we received quite a few baby accessories: bibs, a tiny outfit, a pink sweater, some soft toys, and some receiving blankets. We added them to the small pile beginning to accumulate on the full-sized guest bed, which currently occupies the guest bedroom, which is destined to become her room.  Since our daughter doesn’t currently own any furniture or storage containers, I’ve spread these gifts out on the guest bed. Each time I walk past the room I see everything on display. It's strange to view all of these things that ultimately belong to a third person about to join our house, the tiny human fusion of Fabulous Husband and myself swimming around in my belly. 

We just ordered a crib. Actually we placed an eBay bid for a mini co-sleeper, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that I can’t imagine what it will be like to set this item up in our home.  And where are we going to put all of the other things that our daughter will need?  Her plastic bathtub, her ear thermometer, her onesies, her teeny socks?  We’ll have to start using the guest room dresser.  But she’s not a guest.  So probably what I mean to say is that we’ll have to start using her dresser.  Which means that the guest room – her room -- should probably be painted now, before our lives are busy in ways we can only read about.