Nope, not the MTV show.

This weekend we really dived into baby shopping. Before, we dabbled in this and that, looked around — we even registered, but didn't scan anything. But starting Saturday, we got down to business. One main focus was finding a crib.

At first, we were really stuck on a convertible crib — you know, the kind that eventually becomes a bed. I am not sure why, but these convertible cribs are different here. From what I have seen, in the U.S. they mainly convert to a headboard and footboard for a double bed, but here in Mexico the most common kind converts into a twin bed.

This is one we were flirting with for awhile:

Source

See, it's like a bed, with bureaus on the end that you can later take off. And this one actually has a trundle as well. The beauty is that you don't have to use some fancy toolkit to turn this into a bed — you can see the bed right there. We liked this one also because it's made by some people in Monterrey who seem to know their stuff in terms of crib safety, separation between slats, safe paint, etc. Ultimately I had my doubts, though, because of the height of the bureaus. If we use that for diaper changing, it's going to be a very up-close-and-personal experience. We also started to wonder if it would make sense to put off the expense of a big-kid bed until the kid is actually big enough to use it.

So, we kept looking. And if there's anything I learned between a read-through of Baby Bargains and a walk-through of Mexican stores, it's that not all of us have the same ideas about, say, making sure slats are far enough apart to keep a baby from getting his head stuck in the side of his crib. Uptight gringos have rules out the wazoo about these things, while laid-back Mexicans prefer to cover the whole thing with a gigantic puffy bumper bad and call it a day. Oh yeah, they are also way into bumper pads, which we know from BB is a no-no.

Now, don't get me wrong, BB is a GREAT book and without it we'd be (perhaps blissfully) ignorant of what to look for. But it's also made things really frustrating because basically every crib I see has started to resemble a big cute baby death trap of some sort, whether because of the drop sides, huge spaces, cut-outs, particle board parts, soft mattress, etc. Add to all that the fact that almost all of the cribs we saw were in the $700-1,000 USD range. I know some people spend that on a crib and I'm not saying we won't, but in Baby Bargains-land (the U.S.), there are apparently cribs from $100 U.S. up.

Ultimately we found something we think might work. We went to the Mexico City version of Ikea, named, amusingly enough, Idea, and there we saw an Ikea-like crib, a simple small white one, for just more than $100 U.S. including the mattress. It was unreal to see that after everything else we had looked at! It was cute, with no drop sides, no big spaces, no cut-outs, none of that bad stuff. It did have a little particle board in places (which apparently sometimes contains formaldehyde), but I don't think it was too bad. The vast majority was actual wood. And supposedly the paint and whatnot are all baby safe. The mattress could use replacing but for a hundred bucks, what do you want? (Another thing apparently not regulated here — mattress size. So we also have to figure out if there are any sheets in the world to fit this bad boy.)

Speaking of boys... one last catch with the cute cheapo crib — it comes in white with blue accents or white with pink accents. Yes, how unfair! But if we get it, we'll get the blue one. Easier to turn that unisex with some multicolored sheets than to make a pink crib look more manly, right?