Friday, December 28, 2007

Sticker Shock, All Over Again

Jen and Daddy left this morning, to go to Zurich for a few days. I just heard from Jen a little bit ago, and they got there fine and have walked around the old town and she's pretty much fallen in love with it already. =) Glad to know they're having a good time.

Zach and I took the opportunity of this free afternoon to shop for a car seat for Loki. This should have been a fairly simple task, but wound up irritating me to no end. I was under the (apparently mistaken) impression that car seats came with the base included, which made the 250chf standard price for a car seat around here seem... reasonable. Sort of. (I was already miffed at having to pay that much when I could buy a perfectly good and well-rated seat in the US for $100 or less)

Then we get to the store and find out that the 250chf car seat I'd been looking at actually did not come with the car base... Nope, that base costs an extra 250chf. In the end we settled for a different brand, which was on sale for "only" 200chf b/c they'd just come out with a new model (basically, new colors), and the separate base was a "reasonable" 100chf on top of that. Egads.

Before leaving the store we checked to see how it would fit in the car, and well, I guess it's stable enough? You basically wrap the lapband of the car's seatbelt through the base, and then the shoulder strap around the back of the seat itself and it feels fairly stable. Not as stable as I might like, but I guess that's how it's meant to be. Not that the seat is returnable or exchangeable anyway.

So, I'm feeling a bit frustrated at the baby industry right now, and at the ridiculously inflated prices of Geneva. But I'm trying to let it go, since there's no use me getting all worked up about it. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do, and just deal with it.

In better news, we met with the midwife this morning and everything went great. She looked over my records and modified my due date according to the ultrasound from the NT scan back in August-- the one where they said Loki was measuring a week ahead and so my due date should be Feb 4 instead of the 10th, but when I asked my OB about it she said we'd keep the Feb 10 due date... even though when we looked today at the records she adjusted the due date to Feb 4 on there after all. Date confusion aside, that means I'm technically 34 weeks, not 33, and am that much closer to entering that 5-week window during which he could come at any time (this was part of the motivation for buying the car seat today, realizing we don't have much time left!).

And now I think I'll go accompany my husband while he cooks me a lovely salmon dinner, and try to relax tonight and enjoy a peaceful evening alone with him. =)

7 comments:

  1. wow, how exciting about the extra week!!

    i know what you mean about prices here, but i always try to remind myself that it isn't fair to compare directly, salaries are also higher than they are in the states (esp right now with the crazy exchange rate).

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  2. also, the seat you got is so much cooler and more pod like than the american ones :)

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  3. For the Love of God, go shopping for baby things in France!

    Everyone I know crosses the border to either Germany, France or Italy to get all of their baby-related furnishings. (And most every other larger ticket item they can!)

    In fact, I have now gotten to the stage where I buy as little as possible in Switzerland because the prices are so much higher (even with the current exchange rate) then they would be pretty much everywhere else.

    Also check the cost of purchasing online in the United States and then paying the international shipping rate (via USPS, not UPS whenever possible) as well as customs. Often it is still cheaper than you can get anywhere in Europe. In this case, the exchange rate definitely works in your favor!

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  4. By the way, I am not buying the "but everyone gets paid better in Switzerland" line I keep hearing.

    The average percentage of household income paid for housing, food, taxes, insurance and all of the other necessities of life is higher than most everywhere else.

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  5. i guess it depends quite a bit on the position/industry, i know that it is true for my position as a graduate research assistant, i make about 50% more than i would in the US, and about 100% more than i would in France (granted none of these are very large numbers, but it makes a difference!) And some of the major costs of living (rent for example) are just as much as I paid when I was living in California, here is where grad students get screwed, the ones who have to pay rent in Santa Barbara make the same as the ones who live in the middle of Kansas. Of course then they have to live in the middle of Kansas :)

    another one is school teachers who make quite a bit more in Switzerland than they do in the US.

    Re shopping in France, it really depends on what the product is/who sets the prices/if spend enough to get the taxes back. For example, IKEA products are often less for the same thing in Switzerland than in France, I think its because IKEA must set a price and then the French VAT is much higher. Of course if you live in Switzerland you can declare the stuff and get the French taxes back and pay the Swiss ones which works in your favor.
    For baby stuff there is a store in that big shopping center in Archamps/Annemasse.

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  6. also about people making more/difference in prices of goods, since i moved over here the dollars has fallen about 25%, so of course the things in the US seem 25% cheaper on my Swiss salary now, but the prices of goods in Switzerland haven't changed that much (nor has my salary) so I still have basically the same purchasing power here, or another way to look at it is I get paid 25% more. Of course this is all only true if you are getting paid in the local currency.

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  7. AAAIIIEEEE--getting close now! And not to scare you or anything but Mel over at Newyorkshire Pudding (http://newyorkshirepudding.typepad.com/) just had her (healthy) baby at 37 weeks!

    I hear you on the carseat thing. We got ours in England sans base for a pretty penny. It works fine in our car here but it'd be easier with the base, which if I wanted I'd have to pay though the nose for in the UK on top of another 80 GBP or so to ship to the US. One thing I wish I'd done is skip the infant carrier and go directly to the combo, which you can use for much longer and has a lot more room. The one we got we can use with our stroller but never do. Oh, well.

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