Consumer Confusion

There are lots of Diaper Cremes out there...Choose wisely.

As a man, (yes my Y chromosome is intact) it's soldered into my DNA to hate shopping. Like all men before, I've learned the steps to successful purchasing...

1. Walk into store
2. Locate desired item
3. Ignore any alternatives to said item
4. Pay for item
5. Leave store

This five step program helped me mitigate the large consumer world for the first 28 years of my life. Sure, there were shopping trips with my mom and sister when I was growing up that nearly killed me, but I survived those long tedious afternoons and thought they were gone forever.

Then we had Natalie. Luckily, through the generous nature of friends and family, we haven't had to do much clothes shopping but I've discovered, through trial and error, that the manufacturers of all baby related items assume that women are making the purchases.

For example, the other day I had to buy some nipples, (are you expecting me to make a joke here? You should have learned by now that this blog is above such low-brow humor and I would never make any kind of joke about buying nipples) so I entered the store and proceeded with the five step program. I found the nipple section of the store, (I was secretly hoping they'd have a whole aisle labeled "nipples" so I could take a picture and send it to my other mature friends) located the specific nipples we needed for the specific bottle we use. This task was difficult for my tiny male shopping brain cell because there are 349 different brands of bottles and nipples. But I got the brand of nipples we use and headed for the checkout.

I decided I needed something manly to divert attention from the fact that I was buying nipples, so I purchased a sports magazine and a bottle of Mountain Dew. "Take that!, judgemental checkout girl" I said to myself.

The next day I woke up fully prepared to boil the previously purchased nipples (you have to boil nipples before you use them) and put them in our nipple rotation, weeding out some of the older nipples intended for younger and less awesome babies than Natalie.

As I began to rip open the package of nipples, I saw a small but vibrant word on the cardboard backing..."Advanced". My tiny male shopping brain cell groggily rolled out of bed and stared transfixed at this word, confused by its meaning. At first, he surmised, it must mean this is for more advanced babies but then he sadly realized that this particular nipple was meant for our brand of bottle but not for the subset of bottles within our brand. The brain cell cursed and many interested onlooking brain cells, which included a pack devoted to baseball box scores and another extremely large group who were only interested because they heard the word nipple, turned to see what was happening.

So now I need to go back to the store and find the right brand of nipples and the right subset within that brand. I see this type of thing happening many more times as Natalie gets older. A mother would have read the label, read the back cover, seen if the nipple came in any different colors, and found a sales clerk to ask if any generic brand nipples fit our particular bottle. In other words, she would have followed the complex female shopping constitution that is too long for any man to understand. But she would have bought the right nipple in the first place.

In related news, we are going shopping this weekend. Luckily, however, my brain cell and I aren't worried. Sara is coming, which means he'll just have to wake up every so often and agree that whatever item she picked out is perfect. Then we can go back to thinking about box scores and other manly things.