There were more babies born in 2007 than in any time in the country’s history, and those 4,315,000 little bundles of joy are potential customers to a growing cadre of baby-centric businesses.

The baby product industry nationally was worth $8.9 million last year, according to the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association.

This year could be stronger.

Not only is there a regenerating supply of new customers every year, but it remains seemingly unaffected by fickle buyers. Even if parents don’t purchase goods for themselves, they will always buy for their babies, slow economy or not.

Professional organizer Mary Devereaux, owner of The Uncluttered Baby in Indian Harbour Beach, Fla., said that her business remains steady even in the troubled economy.

Devereaux, a former wedding consultant, started her business when she had her first son about 14 months ago and realized there wasn’t much out there to help new mothers get and remain organized.

“I couldn’t get a straight answer on what I needed,” she said. “I quickly figured it out by researching, and I started doing free consultations. It’s so overwhelming, and just the stresses in having a child … you don’t need anymore stress with a newborn.”

Devereaux isn’t alone in recognizing the economic viability of the baby products industry in this economy as well.

Last year, the National Independent Nursery Furniture Retailers’ Association, Inc., had a sold-out trade show, boasting 1,100 exhibitors of juvenile product industry stores and services. More than 300 of those exhibitors were first-timers, according to the representatives of the association.

As people try to cut down costs, baby “swap shops” or consignment shops are gaining in popularity, as well.

Susan Baustain, director of Once Upon A Child in Melbourne, Fla., said the company, which purchases gently used clothes and resells them, has seen high single-digit increases in sales over the last few years.

“When people are looking for a value, we’re being thought of even more than we have before,” she said. “We’re being thought of not only because of the value but because we’re at the forefront of recycling.”

The waste-not, want-not attitude of today’s consumers is what many baby consignment and resale stores thrive on. Swapping and exchanging at a lower price instead of paying more and buying new pays off in more ways than just saving money, according to Ruhling-Spilos.

“Our slogan is ‘Go Green. Go Consignment’,” she said. “It’s better to buy reused than new because you’re just going to fill up the landfills.”

GNS

Kissing is so common that many of us don’t think there’s more to it than meets the lips. Kissing is a universal language – a cross-cultural phenomenon, a sign of love, affection and kindness. It could also be nature’s way of filtering certain people from our lives.

Have you ever thought about why you liked someone until you kissed them?

According to research conducted by Gordon Gallup, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany, kissing is a way to weed out people who are genetically incompatible with you.

“The evidence suggests that kissing evolved as a mate-assessment technique and that females, in particular, not only use kissing as a mate-assessment technique, but once they’re in a committed relationship with a male, they continue to use kissing as a way to monitor and update the status of their relationship,” he says.

Bad kiss is a deal breaker
Maybe that’s why a kiss can spell the kiss of death to a budding relationship.

In the same study, most of the respondents admitted that they were attracted to someone only to have that attraction wane after they kissed him or her for the first time. After a bad kiss, then were no longer interested in building anything solid with that person. “There may be unconscious mechanisms that would make people make an assessment of genetic compatibility through a kiss,” says Gallup.

Jennifer Schmall recalls a time when she experienced a bad kiss.

“It was kind of like an epiphany, like, ‘What am I doing?’ ” says the Titusville, Fla., resident. “It wasn’t so much sloppy. It just didn’t feel right. It was pretty much over at that point. It became, ‘Let’s be friends.’ Yeah, that was the deal breaker.”

Now engaged, Schmall describes her first kiss with her now-fiance as a deal maker. It sealed the deal on whether or not she was going to continue to date him.

“It was very unexpected, because he kind of snuck it in there when we were playing a game of pool,” she says. “I shot a ball into one of the pockets, and to congratulate me, he leaned over and gave me a kiss. It felt right. I knew afterwards that he was definitely relationship material.”

Danielle Smith of Satellite Beach, Fla., recalls a similar experience with a bad kisser.

“It was like, what the heck was that?” she says of the sloppy, wet kiss. “It was horrible.”

Now also engaged, Smith says she got “butterflies” after her first kiss with her fiance.

“It was exciting, like, ‘Oh, gosh,’ ” she says. “Kind of like where you feel like you’re in high school again, just kind of giggly.”

Men kiss from Mars,

women from Venus

Gallup’s study, which involved about 1,000 college students, also suggests that men and woman kiss for different reasons.

According to Gallup, men tend to kiss to gain sexual favors or to reconcile, whereas women kiss to check the status of their relationships. Kissing is also a way for men to connect with their partners and keep them interested physically. Men’s saliva has trace amounts of testosterone, he says.

“As a consequence of male saliva exchange extending over a long period of time, it’s conceivable that the testosterone in male saliva can stimulate female sex hormones and make females more receptive to sex,” he says.

And while the male respondents in the survey say that they would be more than happy to get physical with women who were bad kissers, most of the female respondents said they wouldn’t dare.

This finding may be biologically significant as well.

According to Gallup, women have a small reproductive window in their lives, which can be why women tend to place so much more emphasis on that first kiss. Biologically, women don’t have the time, nor can they afford to get it wrong.

An ‘incredible exchange’

of information

Smith says that she does kiss a lot during her relationship, but that lustful kiss has worn off and has been replaced by a more typical kiss as the status of her relationship has progressed.

“Once you get to that kind of comfort level, it’s not as much,” she says. “More so now, it’s a hello, goodbye type thing.”

Gallup’s research says that while a kiss won’t necessarily make a relationship, it can kill one.

“There’s an incredible amount of exchange of information, even the exchange of chemical information (during a kiss),” he says.

That first-kiss bug can strike men as well. Scott Burkett says that his first kiss with his partner and fiance Dawn Falotico was “magical.”

“It was in her bird’s room, and it’s painted blue and has stars on the ceiling that glow when you turn the lights off,” he says. “It was perfect.”