How to Make Seventeen Choices for the Low Price of $1.25

I have a mini rant today.  Here it is:

Can you tell from the picture?  There are SIXTEEN different types of teethers here.  Sixteen.  Cordie used to have a key teether but it got poop on it.  Yes, poop, on a teether.  There is poop everywhere in my life right now.  Anyway, I tried to boil the teether to sanitize it, but I was still a little icked out by the possibility of giving her a previously poopy object back to stick in her mouth.  So I wasn't really sad when the gel in the keys expanded too much and burst.  I wasn't sad until I stood in front of this section and went "are you kidding me??"  Parenting is filled with a plethora of decisions of various weights that you have to make every single day.  This should be a priority level one, but all of these options suddenly make it more complicated than it should be.  Should I get a vibrating teether?  Should I get the three pack with different shapes for different teeth?  Should I get the cheapest thing because we may need to buy a few of these over the course of all the teething?  Then, once you decide that, you're faced with the constant question of should I buy a gender specific or gender neutral color?  That question alone has gender political connotations that get brought up in the Mommy Wars all the time.  It's just too much.

You know what else is too much?  The number of car seat choices and the price of these things!  Cordie is 27.5 inches tall and her infant carrier goes up to 30 inches, so it's time to start looking for a next level car seat.  Hold me, I'm scared.  

I started with a fairly broad search on the Babies 'R' Us website and had forty-seven different convertible car seats to choose from.  Even when I narrowed it down I had twenty-seven.  I don't need that many options!  I want five, five choices with easily distinguishable characteristics.  Instead I have almost thirty that look incredibly similar and yet some cost almost $400.  That's the brilliance of this though, from the manufacturer's perspective, you HAVE to have a car seat if you ever want to leave the house and what price would you put on your kid's safety?  There isn't one and they know that, so they can charge hefty amounts and you'll pony up the cash because you have no choice.  Well, you have choices, twenty-seven choices plus the color choices of each seat.

By the way, I went with the cheap teether in pink.  Judge me if you must.