Baby stuff

We are having a baby in October and are trying to decide what to buy and not waste money.

I am buying some stuff used when I can just because some of these things only get used for a few months so it seems like a waste to spend a ton on them.

I am really trying to avoid buying things more than once. Like buying a stroller we don't like so we have to buy a new one.

What things have you guys purchased that you wish you did't and what have you gotten that has been really good?

Oh and has anyone used cloth diapers? Everyone says how expensive disposable ones are so I have been looking to see if cloth ones could save some money.

Congratulations!

Craigslist is your friend. Babies are only babies for a short time, so you can often get like-new stuff at a fraction of the price. For us, it didn't hurt to be living near a wealthy area where people were regularly listing high-end stuff.

A good stroller is worth the investment if you'll use it. We started out with a Bugaboo Frog. I was very pleased with it. It does take up a fair amount of space in the trunk, but it fit in our Tercel, so it should fit fine in most cars. Definitely not worth $600-800 (to me), but we got it used for $300 (including the Graco carseat adapter), and it seemed like a good investment. My only gripe was that the handlebar didn't extend. I'm 6'3" and could have used a couple extra inches of handle. On the newer Chameleon model they've fixed that. When we moved to Belize, we sold the Frog and picked up a Baby Jogger Summit XC. I swapped the tires for wider knobbies since there are no paved roads where we live. Works great over dirt, rocks and sand. My only gripe with it is lack of parts to repair it if damaged. I contacted the company about buying parts and never got a reply. Parts were easy to get for the Bugaboo.

Another thing I loved was the Baby Sherpa diaper bag. Perfect size for carrying all the stuff for the baby, insulated pockets for bottles, etc., changing pad. Great for two additional reasons: Your hands are free to carry your baby and/or anything else you need to. You or your wife/partner can wear it without being ashamed. Try that with a Petunia Pickle Bottom.

If your wife/partner is planning to breast feed, a good quality Medela breast pump is also worth spending some bucks on. They resell well, so you should be able to recoup your investment.

My wife loves her Moby Wrap. We're not into that whole kangaroo care crap, but the babies love to be up next to mommy and my wife likes to be able to have her hands free. It's comfortable enough that they'll sleep inside when young. As they get older, they love to be carried up front facing outward. I can't tell you how many airports we went through with my wife wearing the Moby Wrap and Baby Sherpa and still having her hands free.

We bought a bunch of cloth diapers (including both bumGenius and FuzziBunz) and never ended up using them regularly. We had trouble finding ones that would fit our skinny, tall baby right. Poo and pee leakage all the time. Then, whenever there's a poopy, you've got to find somewhere to put it in the toilet and rinse the diaper. If you're out in public, you have to carry soiled diapers around until you can get home to wash them. My best advice for diapers: Target's house brand. Decent quality diapers at half the cost of Pampers or Huggies.

It's very easy to get caught up in the excitement and buy thousands of dollars worth of stuff for the baby. We fell into that trap with the first one. Now that we're on baby number two, it's a whole different story. Literally all we have is a crib, some pacifiers, clothes, a diaper bag, a car seat and a stroller. Oh and one of those snot suckers.

How does that stroller do on rough terrain like an unpaved trail or a wooden dock? We were at a get together last night and got the recommendation of a BOB Jogging Stroller because they had a standard one with four wheels and it sucked if they went to a park or the fair. The jogging strollers just seem so big though the Frog looks like a good size and it has large wheels on one side so maybe that helps with rough terrain?

My wife is planning on breast feeding we haven't even looked at the pumps yet. I am afraid of getting a used one of those so I haven't looked at them on Craigslist. I was reading insurance will cover those sometimes so I am hoping hers does.



That is the amount of stuff I am going for. I did buy a swing because it was 20 bucks on craigslist but who knows if we will use it.

A couple useful thoughts:

- Don't get a "diaper bag." Instead, get a water-proof lined messenger bag. We got a basic Timbuk2 model that now serves a variety of non-baby purposes.

- You'll be changing diapers/nappies at night. Get yourself a red lightbulb, which will allow you to see without blinding you. (Although there is some controversy about optimal night vision light color.)

- Baby poop stinks something awful. There are all kinds of sealed trashcans you can buy. We got a model that had a goofy rotating piston contraption and took standard trashbags. There are fancier ones that take custom trashbags and generate diaper sausages. Our ultimate conclusion was that these contraptions were effective for pee diapers and useless for poop.

- Your stroller shopping decision is entangled with your carseat decision. Car seats come in "permanent" versus "docking station" models. The permanent models have the benefit that they are adjustable from birth all the way up to 40+ pounds (whereas kids outgrow the docking station models somewhere earlier, like 20 pounds). The "docking station" models have the benefit that you can connect or disconnect your kid from the car without unbelting them. You can also "dock" your kid with a compatible stroller or even flip those restaurant high chairs upside down and dock them with the base. (It really works.) We ultimately went with a "permanent" car seat and an extra super duper lightweight stroller; we got to be pretty good about getting our kid in and out of the car without waking her up. There were times we had the docking station varieties (rental cars, etc.), and the convenience was outweighed by the OMG heavy issue. Also, this is one area where you probably want something new rather than used. By the time our kid outgrew the seat and stroller, both were definitely "distressed."

TOP TIP: Look for how easy or hard it is to remove the cloth bits, since there will come a day when the seat is covered in something unpleasant and you'd just assume stuff it in the washing machine.

- Baby Einstein and other such things are now apparently proven to be pure, unadulterated evil to inflict on kids less than age 2. However, they're an effective way to buy yourself 30 minutes to get something useful done in a pinch.

- If you're going with disposable diapers/nappies, spend some quality time trying the various brands. Price is irrelevant. Good fit is essential so you don't have any, umm, leakage. Of course, there will come a day when it's time to potty train the kid. This won't be fun, regardless of what tactic you take.

- Traditional cribs (we got one secondhand) have this gate that moves up and down and makes a ton of noise, even if you lubricate all the appropriate bits. With Ikea cribs, you just lean over and pick up your kid. Plus, when they get older you can remove one of the walls and they can get in and out themselves. Ikea FTW.

- Baby gates. If you've got stairs, then you legitimately need baby gates on top to keep the kid from having a bumpy ride. If you've got a single story, it's not clear baby gates are all that useful. Better to go whole hog with cabinet locks and outlet covers and try to baby-proof your world as much as feasible.

- Eavesdropping devicesBaby monitors. We never got one. The false alarm rate with these things is crazy. Oops, a little gurgle! When there was a genuine thing that required our attention, our kid was quite capable of rattling the neighbor's windows with her screaming. Your mileage may vary.

- Cameras. This is the excuse you've been waiting for. "It's for the baby." I initially got a cheapo point-and-shoot to leave in the diaper bag, but my wife was unhappy with the picture quality. Okay fine. So I got a decidedly non-cheapo point-and-shoot (a Panasonic LX-3, since stolen and replaced with an LX-5). Also, expect that you'll be making lots of prints to ship off to the non-Internet-saavy grandparents.

- Pacifiers (late addition to my list). We ended up with one of these Wubbanub pacifiers. Highly recommended and cheap. If it falls out, your kid can (eventually) pick it up and put it back in without bugging you.

Pretty sure a lot of those traditional models are now banned for sale. Do try to save as much as possible when buying a crib. It's only going to be used for about 2 years, so IMO, it doesn't make any sense to spend crazy money.

We have bought a TON of stuff used.

The docking station vs non docking car seat debate. We are thinking one that has the docking station would be the best when the kid is to small to really move around much but after that do you really ever un-dock it ? Like how many months do you get where you load the kid in it in the house and carry it to the car? My thinking is you don't get long. I see people in stores with probably close to new borns having the baby bucket in their carts but I am thinking after they are old enough to sit up you don't bother with the bucket and just stick them in the kid seat in the cart.

So my thinking is you are only going to get like six to eight months were you are actually un-docking the bucket from the car so it would probably be better to get a car seat that can be used longer. The thing my wife said I don't know is when they are at the age where you could leave them in the bucket and carry it in with you what do you do with them if you have a car seat that doesn't un-dock? Just carry them or do you have something else you put them in?

As far as cribs go I know 2011 they can't sell drop sides anymore but you can order kits to immobilize the side from the manufactures. I am thinking a couple of screws would work too.

I agree one of the devices that is supposed to monitor breathing would just cause paranoia but I do want a video baby monitor. We have a two story and the bedroom will be upstairs.

Baby carrier: ergobaby. This is good up until they're huge (like our 3 year old rides in it sometimes). We also had a baby bjorn but that gave me back pain even when they were tiny.

For a baby monitor, we used a Philips DECT one for both kids - for audio - and later on we added video using a wifi webcam so that we could just use our phones (including remotely with a hole punched through the firewall). We use a LTS LTCIP830MV-W (white webcam with IR illumination). It's the Y-Cam model (you can use Y-Cam FW updates) and it does audio+video.

I've posted this one before...

jk's (reasonably short) "Must-Have list of Baby Stuff":

1) The bouncy seat with the vibrating motor. It really calmed both of my kids down, and let the younger sleep while congested. Which was pretty much every other week from November to March of his first year thanks to his big sister's preschool germ factory. Pediatricians don't like to medicate infants much at all.

2) A Baby Bjorn or similar concept. Wearing a baby frees up both hands.

3) A white noise generator. We have creaky floors, and they'd wake all too often otherwise. I like the one at http://www.marpac.com/soundscreen.asp - it's tunable, natural white noise, not Smarter Image electronic white noise which irritates me. But I guess I'm a snob that way. The kids are 7 and 10, they each have one, and we still travel with 'em.

4) Linda Ronstadt's "Dedicated to the One I Love" lullaby cd. It includes a unique interpretation of Queen's "We Will Rock You". And any Enya music. Years later, they still go to sleep to them on occasion, especially if they wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep.

Those four we never, ever traveled without. This fifth one was for my wife:

5) A special monitor that has a pad under the crib mattress to detect motion, including breathing. It alarms if there isn't motion for 30 seconds. SWMBO worried about SIDS and is a very light sleeper under the best of circumstances. Irrational? Perhaps, but this kept her from going to look in on them every couple hours or waking up whenever she heard an odd noise. And babies make a lot of odd noises. Whoever coined the phrase "sleeps like a baby" didn't have "quiet" in mind. "Limp" or "angelic", perhaps, but not "quiet".

6) A crib sheet that is vinyl on the bottom and fabric on top, so that, um, "stuff" doesn't get onto or into the mattress. When they got that sick (and ours did - rarely, but they did), it's really easy to change, especially at 3 am - we'd just fold it up with all the spooge inside, put on a fresh one, and go back to sleep with fingers crossed.

7) Diaper Genie. It worked for us.

Everything else was mostly fluff. We never used any hi-zoot bottles, just the basic Gerber Nuk stuff. My first was a pacifier kid (she slept with at least three - one in each hand and one in her mouth. She'd slowly lose them overnight; it helped to have spares. The younger is a stuffed animal kid. "Puppy" was one of his first words, though we've long since called his favorite one "Stinky Puppy". With cause. (Note: get machine washable stuffed animals!)

Don't know if the list will help you (or anyone else), but I thought I'd toss it out there.

-jk

You are correct about the jogging strollers being big. You wouldn't want to put a young baby in them until they can sit up in most cases (about 5 mo. old). Fortunately, many of them come with adapters to clip in a docking seat from Graco or similar so you can use the same stroller from newborn up to 3yrs or so. That BOB stroller looks almost identical to the Baby Jogger one I linked above. I'd just buy the cheaper one. The suspension on the Baby Jogger is fantastic. If you saw the road that leads to our place, it looks like it was designed as an off-road obstacle course more than a road. The suspension is good enough that the baby can sleep while going down it. Also routinely handles boat docks without problem (or being terribly bumpy.) Sometimes I wish the suspension was as good on my YJ.

Did you ever use the Frog on rough terrain ?

I think this Bumbleride one looks smaller and lighter than the BOB one don't know how it goes on rough terrain.

We will be mostly be on pavement but I do want something that would work ok on an unpaved trail if I need it.

The Frog was ok, especially if you leaned it on the two big wheels. I wouldn't get it if you frequent rough terrain, but for the occasional rough terrain, it beats the heck out of a cheap umbrella stroller.

Found a pic of us with some of these products, on a dock no less:



One kid in the Moby Wrap and one in the Baby Jogger. We're on a weekend trip. Notice that all our hands are free and we're not dragging any luggage. This is by design :P

The object hanging from the handlebar of the stroller is a breastfeeding pillow. It's called My Brest Friend. Cheesy name, great pillow. Beats the heck out of the ubiquitous Boppy.

Congrats!

That honestly includes pretty much everything, except disposable items, and highly personal things like toothbrushes, and pacifiers (although, we never bothered with a pacifier for our daughter; we prefered to figure out why she was crying, and solve that need, rather than just jam a bit of rubber in her mouth).

Oh, and car seats. Car seats have expiry dates. Don't buy a used car seat unless you know a) that it's well within the expiry date (plastics break down when in the sun and hot car), and b) that it hasn't been in any accidents.


Any clothing with snaps or other fasteners in the back. Your baby is going to spend a lot of time laying on his/her back, and it will eliminate a point of discomfort. Once we got rid of all the clothes with snaps in the back, our daughter stopped crying whenever she was laying down.

Only if your time has no value, and you pay next to nothing for the additional water and electricity you'll be using to wash them. You also have to be extra vigilant, because diaper rash is far more prevalent in cloth diapers, because there's no wicking away the moisture. We tried cloth diapers, and decided it wasn't worth the hassle, so you can put that in the "wish you hadn't bought" category.

One other thing that turned out to be valuable, but more like 1yr+, was a small-sized poof chair. These things are much more stable than a bouncy seat, and they're cheap.

AKA: Beanbag Chair

Or not. We own one baby bottle, and it's still in the packaging. This one's a totally personal thing. My wife didn't go back to work immediately, so we never bothered with the whole pumping thing. My brother-in-law's wife, however got a lot of mileage from a pump, because their baby had trouble latching on. I'd say wait until you need one, before buying one.


My best advice for diapers: ignore the above advice.

Seriously, they're like shoes... different diaper brands fit different. On our daughter, Target and Pampers tended to be leakier than Huggies, but some parents we talked to had the opposite experience, and it was Huggies that leaked the worst. (For that matter, we also hate Target and Pampers baby wipes. Both of them seem to smear things more than wipe them off.) If Target brand diapers fit, and work for you, that's great; the cheaper, the better, until it's the reason you're carrying your baby through the store by her armpits, while poop is oozing through her clothes. (Not that that won't happen to you at least once anyway, no matter which brand you use.)

Clip coupons, and watch for sales. We got our best price on Huggies when buying them with coupons, when they were already on sale at Target. CostCo does *not* have the best prices on baby items, despite being a bulk retailer.

Uh, diaper services exist for a reason. So do diaper covers. And your argument is that plastic wicks moisture better than cotton? You should tell that to every cheap napkin I've used at a restaurant.

Second this.


I never thought of that... I'll have to give it a try.

Spot on. My brother had one. The area still smelled like baby poop. We opted for a regular trash can with a closing lid, and taking out the trash every couple days.

Like Bruno said, drop-side cribs have been recalled, and are now illegal to sell, even secondhand.

What I liked about ours was that the bed height was adjustable, so you can start out with it on the highest setting so you don't have to bend over very far, and lower the bed as the child progesses through rolling over to sitting up to standing up.


But don't put a gate right at the bottom. Let the baby have a stair or two to practice with.


Seconded on this, too, even with a dual-story house.

Yep. But if your goal in using cloth diapers is to save money, you aren't going to do it by using a diaper service. If your goal in using cloth diapers is to save the environment, you still aren't going to do it by using a diaper service, because of all the chemicals they use in the laundering process.

Which aren't always effective, either.

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? When's the last time you even picked up a diaper, let alone a used one? The inside of a disposable diaper is not made of plastic. There's a layer of fabric, under which is a pad of stuff that absorbs liquid. That pad of stuff is so effective at absorbing liquid that, unless you let it get completely saturated (say... by not changing the baby for several hours), it will draw moisture through the fabric layer so well that you will have a hard time feeling any moisture on the fabric itself. I have changed wet diapers that do not feel wet. Cotton, on the other hand, will just hold all the moisture right there, at the point of contact.

http://www.babynaturale.com/whindidi.html

Linking to, but not an endorsement of, a cloth-diaper site.

Almost, but not quite. Beanbag chairs have beans in them. Poof chairs (and equiv.) have foam in them. They're quite comfortable.

(The original idea for these things probably comes from Xerox PARC. The foam bag chairs are wonderful, but after a few years the foam goes flat and you have to replace it.)

On the subject of chairs, we started both of our girls eating baby food in a Bumbo with a tray. Works great for us until they can sit well in a high chair on their own. Of course, to be truly useful, you have to ignore the warnings about putting it on raised surfaces. IMHO, you just need to exercise some discretion. Also nice to have the baby be able to sit on the kitchen counter and watch while mom makes dinner, etc.

Great idea. We just used a small lamp with a low wattage bulb. Helps to be able to see well enough to get the poop out of all the crevices. Especially the menconium. Eww.



One of the many good reasons to breastfeed - the poop doesn't stink near as bad. I feel bad for my friends with formula fed babies...I can smell that stuff even before the change and it's nasty.

We had one of those contraptions with the first one. With the second, we just use a rubbermaid tub with a trash bag and twist the top of the bag between uses. Give the tub or trashcan the anti-bacterial disinfectant treatment every week or so.



Even when we had one, the gate was useless. I agree to look for the adjustable height. You only need it 6 inches deep or so while they're a newborn. As soon as the baby rolls over the first time, lower that sucker down.



We just taught our baby to go down the stairs. No annoying gate needed. Requires work on the parents part to train though. Many Americans lack patience for this.



Thirded. Except now our cabana is a separate building from the lodge where we spend a lot of our time, so we use one to know when the kids wake up from their naps. So I suppose they do have their legitimate uses. The one we have you can turn off the sound and it will vibrate only when the volume hits a certain threshold. Cuts down on the annoyance.

Spot on. I've been changing diapers for the last two and a half years straight, both cloth and disposable. Only good excuse to do cloth is to lower your environmental impact. I still sleep ok at night (in my non-air conditioned solar-powered house).

Or to help potty train your kid earlier. Back when cloth diapers were the norm, kids were generally potty trained around 18-months to two years. Now the average age is two and a half, with some kids taking 'til they're five.

We've used both disposable and a few brands of "cloth" diapers, including what's considered by most to be the top product, Bum-Genius (we have 30 of them). Most brands of disposable diapers put every cloth product to shame when it comes to absorption. There's no contest.

You can argue the environmental impact and costs, since there are a lot of variables. I like to think cloth is better in both these respects though.

The biggest down-side to cloth is absorption and having to do a lot of laundry. The biggest downsides to disposable are cost, storage until garbage day and the landfill. 'Garbage' is only picked up in our town once every 2 weeks.

There's an argument that modern disposable diapers are actually "too good", in the sense that they do such a good job of reducing baby discomfort (e.g., by wicking away moisture) that kids delay developing control over their bowels.

So, yeah, if you want to go with cloth, you "solve" that problem, but you're also carrying around lots of plastic bags and changes of clothes. All said and done, it pretty much sucks to be you, no matter what path you take.

(That said, cloth diapers make for fantastic rags, better than old t-shirts or kitchen towels. It's worth keeping some around, regardless, for cleaning up the inevitable messes.)

Yup. That's all we use ours for, now.

Guess we're fortunate. Ours was potty trained at 21 months, no accidents at night by 23 months.

I have never seen an actual chair that was filled with beans only the foam kind. I would think beans would be really heavy.

My thinking with the cloth diapers would be to have some to use at home but on the go just use disposables cause yeah carrying used diapers around would be impracticable.

The beans in a bean bag chair are polystyrene beads about 2-4mm in dia.

Makes a truly insane mess if the bag gets opened. The beads stick to any surface with a charge on it.

We've got a one of those (I think it's this one, or similar -- we got it on eBay). When the baby's new-born, you set it near the top. As the baby gets older, you move the base down. Now that Alice (our youngest) can pull herself up, the base is set to the lowest height.



We don't have a choice -- our banister doesn't start until the third step.

You do NOT want this kind of thing in your house. I know of one case, where the child in the scooter stage, chasing a toy, worked is way into the tipped over cube and put his head thru the handle. He was discovered before strangling but it could have been very bad.