As previously mentioned, Matt and I got the crib mattress over the weekend, along with a few other things.

Now, I don't know about most people reading, but if you've been shopping for baby stuff recently, you know there is a ridiculous, overwhelming amount of baby stuff out there. Like, way more than there needs to be. And after sorting through brands and styles and everything else for the first, like, three things I bought, I had had enough of that.

When I got to the mattress decision, I was totally lost. Foam? Coil spring? Brand name? No name? How many coils does there really need to be? What density foam? Do I need a mattress protector? What size sheets? Will this fit in my crib? ARGH!

I finally decided to just buy whichever mattress had the best warranty to price ratio, which was a Simmons mattress at Walmart (15 years, about 50 bucks, and it was a name I actually recognized). Now a crib mattress is an awkward thing to maneuver when you're having trouble maneuvering yourself most days, so Matt, despite his deep dislike of Walmart, had to come with me.

First bad decision: we went on the weekend. Don't try this at home, kids.

Second bad decision: I remembered a bunch of other stuff I wanted to pick up (cat stuff, laundry baskets, a garbage for the baby's room, etc.) and we tried to do this without the use of a cart, as there were none to be had.

Third bad decision and by far the worst: we tried to use the self checkout counter.

I think maybe the software for those things is not quite up to the level yet.

We saw them and thought, hey, shorter lines! Just scan, pay and go! How hard can it be? We've got four degrees between the two of us, we can figure this out!

Well.

It didn't seem to be scanning anything we were putting in. Oh sure, it would beep delightfully at us, but our total never moved from $0.00. We thought maybe it was the package we were scanning and decided to try a different one, but no luck. Then we thought, well maybe the list doesn't show up until the end and we would have scanned the change pads five times over, so we hit the "Cancel All Items" buttons and started over. Then we tried the mattress.

First off, the mattress needed to be lifted and held at a bizarre angle in order to get the code to the scanner. And it beeped! But it did not show a total again. Even worse, we were now getting a warning about an illegal number of items, possibly because it beeped again as we were trying to put the mattress down. (Mothers of twins, don't try to shop at Walmart, I guess.) Then we tried to clear it by cancelling all items and it wouldn't because it was already illegal! ARGH.

We decided to bail at that point and just wait in line like everyone else, though I did go find a Walmart girl to reset our machine before we ditched. Unfortunately for the next person in line, she was just as anxious as we had been to get out of there and jumped on our machine despite our warnings that it was seriously foobarred.

So, yeah. Not doing that again. My three-word summary: Total. Gong. Show.