A recent thread on the citybaby message board sprung me into a frenzy: “Registry question,” it read. “BBB or BRU? Which one did you register at, and why?” Normally, I am pretty good at deciphering citybaby code: dh is dear husband, db – dear baby, ROTFLMAO – rolling on the floor laughing my you-know-what off. But BBB and BRU? I posted the question.

The responses ranged from the straightforward – Buy Buy Baby and Babies “R” Us, which answered my query, to the exasperated – “Hel-lo! Where have you been?”, to the incredulous – “You don’t know BBB? Tell me you’re in your first trimester!” I was not in my first trimester – in fact, I was in my third. But apparently, I am the only pregnant woman in the city who hasn’t created a baby registry.

Doing our wedding registry had been hard enough. I had ambivalent feelings about making a wish list of gifts. It just seemed greedy. I also had no idea what to register for. After yet another pleading phone call from his mother (“People keep asking me where you’re registered, and I don’t know what to tell them!”), Andy dragged me to Crate and Barrel, where he and I spent an agonizing Sunday afternoon amid all the other yuppie couples noting our chosen wares on forms in silver clipboard binders – a bunch of Banana Republicans on medical rounds.

When I went back to Crate and Barrel to return the things on our registry we didn’t actually want or need – and, since we were clueless, there were a lot of them – I discovered they’d replaced the clipboards with bar-code scanners, so instead of being on rounds, the Banana Republicans were now engaged in a paintball-less game of paintball, “Star Trek” meets “The Price Is Right” meets the old-fashioned spoiled child’s habit of pointing and saying, “Mommy, I want it!”

As happy as I was with our wedding gifts, I may even have been happier that registering was over.

So, in the wake of my citybaby responses, I was left with one burning question: Did I really need a baby registry?

“Yes,” my cousin, mother of two children under 2, said emphatically. “Everyone wants to get you something you need. Without the registry, you’ll wind up with three Diaper Dekors.”

“What’s a Diaper Dekor?” I asked.

Apparently, it is a diaper pail. Clearly, I was clueless. But I was still unswayed by the registry argument. I did not want three Diaper Dekors (in fact, I wasn’t certain I wanted one of them), but registering for gifts still seemed, well, greedy.

“Fine,” my mother said when I told her I wasn’t sure I was going to register, “but if you don’t, just brace yourself for a lot of silly-looking baby clothes instead of something useful like an excersaucer.”

An excersaucer? I didn’t ask her what an excersaucer was – I was too distracted by the thought of tons of tiny sailor suits or frilly tutu-like dresses. The thought of my child dressed as Little Lord Fauntleroy was enough to persuade me. Creating a baby registry became item no. 1 on my to-do list.

The question was: “How?” So I posted it on citybaby and was told to get “The Best Baby Buys Guide” written by a husband-and-wife team (“It’s like a consumer reports for baby stuff,” one poster informed me. “They have a sample registry list and everything”) and take it to the Buy Buy Baby in Manhattan.

And so, last weekend, Andy and I found ourselves heading into Chelsea to create our baby registry.

“Do you remember when this place was all leather bars?” I asked as we passed yet another double stroller on our way down 23rd Street.

“Yeah,” Andy said as he pointed to a nearby corner. “Now there’s an Olive Garden.”

“And a Buy Buy Baby,” I reminded him, lest he get sidetracked by kitschy lunch ideas.

Soon enough, we were entering Buy Buy Baby’s gleaming storefront. “After you,” Andy said, holding the door. My pregnancy had brought about a chivalrous side heretofore unknown in him.

I smiled at him, but the grin soon faded. Buy Buy Baby was enormous. Its aisles were filled with seemingly every piece of baby gear known to man – pieces of baby gear this pregnant woman hadn’t even begun to contemplate seriously. It was also crowded. There were children and parents and, yes, more double strollers. And there were couples – furrowed-browed men and women with big bellies – roaming about the aisles with bar code scanner guns. They looked an awful lot like the couples we saw a few years back while registering at Crate and Barrel. We were all on the same loop – the young urban married conveyor belt. Was registering going along with the herd or was it a rite of passage?

“So where do we start?” Andy asked, and I handed him the Baby Buys Book. “This thing is 600 pages long,” he said, obviously as overwhelmed as I was.

Just as I was about to suggest we go sit down on the rocking chairs I recently learned were called “gliders,” I noticed another pregnant couple, zapper in hand, approaching us. It was none other than Matthew and Courtney, my childhood friend and his wife, my nemesis. I should have known they’d be here.

“Hi, guys,” I said, unable to feign surprise at seeing them. “Working on your registry?”

“Yes,” Courtney said, in a businesslike tone showing hints of stress. “I updated our list online, but we wanted to come and make sure it’s all here now.”

As I silently wondered why anyone in her right mind would tend to their registry like a gardener, the ramifications of what she’d just said hit me.

“You mean you can do this whole thing online?” I asked casting a glance at Andy.

“I guess you could,” Courtney said, baffled by this approach. “If you wanted to.”

Right then and there, my registry problem was solved. Not only could I do it all online, I could look up Courtney’s carefully cultivated, uber-researched list and simply copy and modify it. Courtney was, in fact, good for something!

“You know,” I said, turning to Andy. “Maybe we should get some lunch before tackling the baby registry.”

“I think you might be right,” he said, catching my drift. And with that, we bade goodbye to Matthew, Courtney, and Buy Buy Baby and headed for the Olive Garden.

The Brooklyn Chronicles, a work of fiction, appears each Friday. Previous installments are available at www.nysun.com/archive_chronicles.php. The author can be reached at kschwartz@nysun.com.