Stuff We Didn’t Need
Since we recently moved into a smaller house (while we build the new house), we did a lot of purging of stuff we don’t need or use. Not surprisingly, a lot of the unused stuff was baby gear. I remember when we were pregnant, friends and family gave us so many hand-me-downs that it looked like a baby bomb went off in the house. Lucky me, I have a friend, Catherine, who is a professional organizer so she helped me go through it all. But she’s not a mom so we did keep a lot of stuff we just weren’t sure about.
So if you’re about to be a new mom, here are a few things you can probably live without (although everybody is different) or that will have surprisingly short shelf lives.
Monitor. Yeah, I said it. We had two sets and never used them. They baby sleeps in your room (but not in your bed) the first few months. When we moved him to his crib, his room was right across the hall and we could hear him. Even if we were downstairs with the TV blaring, we heard him if he woke up. Babies are plenty loud.
Wiper Warmer/Bottle Warmer. If you get them used to warm wipes or warm bottles, you’re hosed. Try and do room temperature as often as possible. (If you have a refrigerated bottle of breast milk or formula, warm it up just to room temp. I have a friend whose 13 month old still wants her milk HOT because they warmed her bottles up too much when she was an infant.)
Receiving Blankets. Most of them are too small to use as swaddle blankets. They’re too tiny to really wrap the baby in the stroller. I suppose you could tuck them around in a car seat. But here’s the deal: you’ll get about 20 and only use those teeny tiny ones for a month or two. Get some bigger blankets you can use for swaddling.
Mobiles. I thought it’d be neat to have two mobiles – one for the crib and one for the changing table but our mobiles didn’t fit either. We rigged one for the crib and it was useful for a few months. This is one of those short shelf life things. Once they’re sitting or pulling up, you have to remove it from the crib so they don’t pull on it and get tangled up in it. Get a mobile but don’t spend too much on it! And make sure it’ll fit your crib.
Diaper pail. We used it at first but they do get stinky when the babies get bigger. And when they’re tiny, their diapers just don’t stink that much. By around 8 months old, we gave up on the diaper pail. We take the stinky diapers to the kitchen trash. (But first we wrap them in a glove \which helps keep the stench in.)
There are many, many other things, I’m sure but these are the ones that come immediately to mind. How about you? What were some things you found you could totally live without?
–Sherean
I hardly ever used the bottle warmer either, but I actually did use my monitor quite a bit.
One thing that I couldn’t have done without was the bouncy chair. My kids LOVED that thing.
1I agree on the baby monitor! It was the most expensive thing on our wish list, three friends clubbed together and bought it for us, and we’ve never used it. And when we have tried, the signal doesn’t travel through our walls anyway!
The thing we use least though, is the push chair. We carry the baby in a sling and I really don’t like the push chair now, cause I feel so detached from her!
2@HoneyMommy – We LOVED the bouncy, too. And a swing! I didn’t think we needed both but he practically lived in his swing the first few months and really started digging the bouncy from about 3 months on. We only retired them because he got too heavy for both!
3@Luschka – I haven’t heard of a push chair? We carried Hunter around in a sling (Moby wrap and a Baby Bjorn) for as long as we could. When he hit 22 lbs, the Baby Bjorn was straining (as were our necks) so we had to put that away. Alas, he hit that weight at about 6 months!