The Race for the Crib

There is a horde of sly and cunning parents-to-be, skulking the pages of Craig's List. . .trying to beat other parents-to be at their own game. We all jump on Craig's List, in hopes of finding the baby deal of the century--we've all read the books and articles about how expensive having a baby can be ($7,000 in the first year seems to be about average), and all of us web-savvy, eager-beaver parents think we'll be the ones to prove those stats wrong (without sacrificing safety or quality, of course!)by scoring deals wherever possible.

It took me about 2 days to realize that the coveted holy grail of baby paraphernalia on Craig's List is, not surprisingly, the Pottery Barn Crib.

I began my search for cribs about two weeks ago, thinking I would merely browse the listings for a month or so to get an idea for what's out there, in terms of price and quality. After all, my due date is still 5.5 months away, and it seemed a little early to be shopping for nursery stuff. But, I discovered quickly that once you spot a treasure, you have to strike immediately. . .or it's lost forever (or until it shows up on Craig's List again in 3 years.) After emailing a few folks about some white cribs, and being told that they were already sold, I began to play the game. I checked the listings every few hours, hoping that I would be the first to contact the next crib's seller.

There is an unspoken rule. In general, a good seller will respond to the first person who contacts him about his item, provided the contacter can write a cohesive sentence with correct punctuation. (At least this is how Ben and I decided to whom to sell his old car and a couple of air conditioners.) But, I digress.

Anyway, this past Wednesday morning, there it was:

"Pottery Barn White Dana Crib,$200, Alexandria, VA"


Carefully-crafting and 5-times-proofreading my two-sentence email, I clicked send and anxiously awaited the seller's response. The next morning, I came in to work to happily discover that I was FIRST, and had thrown together an intelligent-enough email to be allowed first dibs at the crib. We arranged the crib exchange for this past Friday afternoon at 5:00.

The sellers were great and let us meet their precious daughter--the one who had "broken in" the crib and had recently moved into her big girl bed. But they also told us that we beat out 8 other people for the crib. It felt like winning the lottery!