Last night we bought a crib. I picked it out myself during a quick scoping-out trip to Baby Depot (part of Burlington Coat Factory).

I have to say that the price of cribs is astonishing. On average, they cost about $200-400. Spending $400 on some wooden slats just seems enormously outrageous to me, especially when you consider that you have to purchase the mattress and bedding separately, at additional cost. And if you want to buy a themed bedding set (like “Bee My Baby” or “Day at the Zoo”) you should be prepared to dish out at least $150. And, of course, if you get the themed bedding set you’ll probably be tempted to buy the matching lamp, mobile, pillows, baskets, nursery organizer, stuffed animals, etc., for hundreds of dollars more. What’s wrong with a couple sets of plain sheet sets and maybe a blanket?

Anyway. Back to the crib. It’s Simplicity Chelsea in honey and cost $159.99 plus tax.

It’s a simple crib compared to some of the other models, but that’s probably why it was only $159.99. I feel like it’s a good size and not too over-the-top like some other styles I saw. The next day I showed John a picture of the crib online and he said, “Why not?” So I went back and picked it up last night. The box barely fit into my car’s trunk (I scraped up my elbow, knee, and ankle trying to cram it in). And it’s still there because I need John’s help to pull it out again.

So. We’re officially People Who Own a Crib. For a baby. Every piece of furniture or clothing we acquire that was formerly foreign but now normal and necessary reminds us that we really will be having a baby in two more months.

My birthday was last week and I received five electronic birthday cards, all from people I work with. Number of real-life cards received: Zero.

It’s not a big deal to receive birthday salutations via email, but since e-cards are inherently impersonal I think people should at least try to make the e-card seem like it’s personal.

E-card Do’s and Don’ts:

1. If you’re going to send a birthday e-card to an employee on behalf of the entire department, please be courteous enough to remove the birthday person’s name from the generic list of employees on the card.

2. While you’re at it, please also correct the typo in “From your friend’s at [name of organization].”

3. If you’re going to create a birthday card in Microsoft Publisher, instead of emailing the Publisher document to the birthday person and letting her open it in Publisher (assuming she has the program installed) and scroll through the card’s four pages in draft format, why not just print it out and give it to her the old-fashioned way?

Besides being baffled by the sense of e-cards, I had a good birthday. My parents came into town and we ate very good ice cream cake from Cold Stone (courtesy of my sister). Another year down!

In looking at this blog’s archives, it came to my attention that our Dream Shard Blog is exactly two years old. It came into fruition on August 2, 2005. Why my husband decided to create a blog on my birthday when there are 364 other perfectly useable days that don’t require pampering your wife with attention and gifts and cake–which pampering presumably should take up most of the day–I have no idea.

In any case, the Blog survives! In the first post John wrote the following:

“Whenever a new blog is created, one always has to wonder–Why? What is this blog going to add that isn’t available anywhere else? Or, in this digital age of information, what information is going to be aggregated of import?

“Hopefully such questions will be answered more fully in time, but suffice it for now to say that I hope to add my own viewpoint over many topics ranging from technology (the profession in which I am employed) to literature and world events. Perhaps just as important, I seek to post those things which I stumble across which are of [some] value to myself, particularly those which took longer to discover.”

Little did John know that his blog baby would be gradually overwhelmed with posts by his wife, and the mature, intellectually stimulating topics he had intended for the blog’s audience would take backseat to his wife’s ramblings of everyday-ness.

Well. Even if the blog hasn’t lived up to its original purpose I hope our family and friends have at least found some genuine pleasure in reading up about the latest, ever-scintillating happenings in our Robinson household.

Happy Birthday, Dream Shard. Oh yeah–and happy birthday to me, too.