Joining late to this thread, a couple thoughts:

- Kid car seats seem to come in two equivalence classes: docking station models for infants, and larger, reversible seats that are good from 0 through 40 pounds (18 kg). We went with the larger seat, from day one, and got a lighter stroller than any of the ones designed to be docking stations. In practice this setup occasionally required removing a sleeping baby from the car (on pins and needles, as it were), but the benefit of having less weight to haul around was a godsend.

- We never bothered with a baby monitor. Our daughter was quite loud enough, all by herself.

- We never bothered with a dedicated "diaper bag". Instead, we bought a Timbuk3 shoulder bag, which can hold tons of baby crap, and has a rubber lining to hold in, umm, leaky bits. That bag has now been repurposed into a general carry-around, which never would have happened had we gotten some cute kiddy bag.

- Pacifiers are quite personal. Our kid did well with the soothie pacifiers that our hospital gave out. The same firm makes "wubbanub" pacies attached to beany-baby style stuffed animals. Our kid was quite attached to this, and by virtue of being graspable, she was (later) able to pick it up and place it back in when it fell out.

- We had the Diaper Champ. Worked great for #1's. For #2's, the stink still got through (at least to my wife's sensitive nose), so we'd dump those in the trash can outside.

- Never forget, that a new baby is an excuse to buy yourself lots of camera and video gear. Repeat after me: "it's for the baby." Among other things, I'll offer a plug for the Sony hard-drive-based camcorders, which connect via USB to Sony-branded DVD burners, letting you crank out DVDs for the grandparental units without having to import things into your computer and so forth. I made a few DVDs with iMovie, but the effort vs. reward isn't really there. Grandparents really don't care for polish on the videos. They just want something now, now, now.

- While sorting out our wedding, I often joked about the wedding-industrial complex, and their ability to try to sell us things that we didn't need. The baby-industrial complex is far, far worse. It's staggering how many utterly useless things they want to sell you. My favorite is probably the wipe warmer. (You don't need one.) Similarly, they have all these saucer-like contraptions that you can drop your kid in, with all sorts of shiny buttons and things for them to drool on. You pay more and more money for more shiny things, with some sort of implicit guilt if you don't get the top of the line gizmo.

- Along those lines, print 4x6 pictures via Internet upload at your neighborhood pharmacy or Costco or whatever. Much easier and cheaper than monkeying around with color inkjet printers.

- Whatever you do, try to avoid battery-powered toys. Half of the stuffed animals now make noise if you squeeze them in the right way. There are few things worse than stumbling around at night, stepping on some damn stuffed animal, and having it start singing a song.