Saving for college...

I was recently a part of a discussion with other moms about whether or not they had savings accounts for their kids, etc. I felt like such a slacker after this conversation. I was proud to just be putting loose change in Joshua's piggy bank. One mom said they were putting $1,000 a MONTH in their kids savings. I don't know how anyone could do that. So tomorrow I'm going to go to the bank and at least get Joshua a savings account to put his $10 or so from his piggy bank and see if they can't do an automatic withdrawal or something just to keep it going. I figure I'll talk to them about the 529 college savings accounts while I'm at it. Although, I've done some reading online and those 529 accounts look so confusing...because you can get one in any state and from what I read our state has one of the worst accounts available. So then how do you pick a state and is that the best way to save for Joshua. I did a little calculator that they have online to figure how much to contribute and it said that for Joshua to go to a Public State College that we would need to contribute $300 a month until he was 18 to pay for it due to rising costs and inflation. That seems like a LOT of money to me but maybe I'm naive. I certainly don't expect to have every penny for his college saved up but would love to be able to help him out by him not having outrageous college costs. Oh well, we can only do our best.