growing baby

The baby books industry is huge. If you buy all the non-fiction published about the subject of parenthood, baby care, safety, pedagogy, etc, plus the millions of books for babies themselves, you can literally get lost in a maze formed by stacks and stacks of conflicting advice, bright colors, and smiling children’s faces.

We’ve decided to limit our exposure to all this stuff, and have gotten three books: the Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy (purpose: learn about what’s happening to Linda), Parenting, Inc. (purpose: learn about how way over-commercialized the parenting industry is — basically, learn what not to buy), and Baby Bargains (purpose: learn what to buy, when you need to buy it). The irony of buying “Parenting, Inc.” — a book about how the parenting industry scares you into buying products — has not escaped us.

It’s actually quite a bit harder than one would thing to escape the desire to buy. I am already looking at camcorders (to be fair, we probably would want one anyway, at some point), and spent about 2 hours today researching baby monitors. There are just so many choices: analog or digital? 900Mhz or 2.4Ghz? one “parent unit” or two? with video or without? cheap and crappy or expensive and good? And this is still the easy stuff — I can imagine how much tougher the decisions will be when we get to things like cribs and strollers. So far all we had to deal with were these semi-optional accessories…