Crib Crisis!

Dave and I thought we were being responsible by ordering and paying for our crib 4 weeks ago. The crib would take between 10 and 12 weeks for delivery, so by ordering early, we were giving ourselves a lot of time to put together the baby room and move out/rearrange the other furniture. We pride ourselves on being organized like this.

And then Babies R Us called on Thursday to report that the crib we ordered had been discontinued, and it took the company 4 whole weeks to report this information to us. Suddenly, we were in crisis mode - we only have approximately 10 weeks left in this pregnancy, and the crib might arrive post-delivery if it took the manufacturer 12 weeks to deliver it! Not that the crib arriving late would be horrible, but still... our organization didn't matter. We no longer had a crib, the one and only piece of furniture for the baby that we've actually bought.

And shopping for a crib in early January had been a pain - we didn't realize how picky we were until we got down to buying one, and then a lot of little things mattered. For example, not all cribs have a drop-down mechanism for one side, and as a petite person, there is just no way I can reach into a full-sized crib and pick up a baby with my short arms. Not to mention the process of changing the crib's sheet. This drop-down feature was important us, and you'd be surprised how many cribs don't have this. Apparently all Americans are now American Gladiator-sized. As are their houses, because many of the cribs we looked at are too large for the baby's bedroom.

Also, we live in a geographical area where baby furniture is relegated to Babies R Us and Target - we looked in regular furniture stores, but no luck. And forget specialty baby boutiques - they don't exist in Central New York, nor could we afford a $900 crib. So our choices of merchants were limited if we actually wanted to see the crib first. We had looked at some cribs online, but without being able to actually see how tall they were, measure them, play with the drop down sides, and see and feel their materials, I didn't want to buy something sight unseen. Some cribs are made from something called, "Manufactured Wood" which is plastic with wood grain painted on it - I never would have known this unless I got to see the stuff in Babies R Us and decide we weren't putting our kid in a plastic crib with painted-on wood grain.

So Friday evening before dinner, Dave and I dragged Paula and Azzy to Babies R Us to find a crib pronto. Even though we had spent a lot of time there already, the store manager who called about the discontinued crib reported that they had new models on the floor, and they were giving us a 10% discount on any other crib we bought. And lo and behold - we found one we liked even better than the original crib, and it'll be arriving next week.

Crisis averted!