Pre-parenting: stuff for Little Bean
October 27, 2014
I’m super grateful for the good friends and relatives who would like to come help. Not just visit, but help. Lord knows most of my family won’t be there for us. There’s a huge difference between the two and I expect that we’ll be so exhausted in the early days I simply can’t take regular visitors who just want to come to see Little Bean and hang out to be entertained. We won’t have help ongoing except that which we pay for so I’m extra grateful for those who would be willing to travel to come lend a hand. We’re luckier than we realized in that respect.
It’s funny how people are gung ho when it comes to buying new things; is it just because tiny things are funny and cute? We’ve shared the news with close family and friends and immediately know who’s going to go shopping as soon as we hang up the phone. I asked them to hold off as, where possible, hand me downs make much more sense to me than new clothes but I suspect I’m being ignored.
Little ones don’t know or care what they’re wearing or using so as long as it’s clear, dry and safe. I don’t want people to waste money on new things with all the perfectly good used stuff floating around.
That said, there’s definitely a few things we’ll need, mostly in the vein of furniture, to help with my limitations.
*Note: I don’t mean to be or sound ungrateful! I am absolutely grateful for whatever people like to give. It’s just a funny thing I’ve noticed.
I’ve joined Amazon Mom (the name still gets my goat a bit: moms are not the only parents or caretakers!) though it feels pretty darn early to do so. It’s just so I can start building a thoughtful and carefully curated registry list. We do have to get some things new and some friends have been after me to get this together the second they heard the news, so I figured I’d get a start on it.
I’m not sure what we’d order regularly just yet but I’ve been experimenting with some Subscribe & Save items and the extra 20% off where Amazon is the best deal (not always the case, remember!) will of course make a big difference. Correction: they’ve gone and reduced the discount to just 15%.Ā š
We’ve been in the Bay Area long enough for the extra concern for the environment to seep into my consciousness: we’re considering some form of cloth diapering. I simply don’t have the energy to do it the truly frugal way which is normally my very first concern, but we might be able to afford some kind of service, modified for our needs. Just contemplating since it’s not cheap to do the service and we’ve already got plenty of costs to stare down.
I think it’s that stuff is cute, cheap (per item) and I personally remember how grateful I was to get stuff for the baby. Now that I have more cash flow, I am happy to buy someone a $10 pack of diapers for no reason.
That’s a good point; even when I didn’t have much cash flow it was rather fun picking out a gift or two.
If we manage to have one, we’ll be clothing our little one in mainly used clothing. There are times that Carter’s and such have deals where the cost is practically the same as thrift stores (think $4), but mainly I’d be happy with gently used thrift store stuff. Maybe consignment, too.
Abigail recently posted…I feel dirty: We have cable again
We should have a pass-around bag of used but in good shape clothing for the wee ones, they outgrow clothes so fast.
We initially did amazon mom, and abandoned ship after only a few months. Target and Costco ended up being WAY cheaper. And Amazon’s price was not consistent even with subscriptions so we could not budget. Very annoying. Plus they send stuff in such bulk we never went through it in a month (like wipes, we had boxes and boxes!!). Definitely experiment, but ultimately for us it did not pan out (to my sadness, because regular, semi thoughtless delivers? YES PLEASE).
Lauren recently posted…Weekend-ing
Good to know! I’ll comparison shop to see, I don’t want to end up more out of pocket just because the deliveries are easy.
Back in the day, there were some studies that showed paper diapers are actually more environmentally friendly than cloth, when you figure in what’s involved in making each, in the heat, water, and chemicals used in washing cloth, and (if you have a service) in the gas and automobile use of delivery and pickup.
And you ain’t seen local environmental damage till you see the diaper rash a baby can get from cloth diapers! Augh! As soon as we switched my son to paper, the unholy rash went away.
We used to have rings of women who would trade baby and early childhood clothes around. That may have been a hippy-dippy thing (we were waaayyy to into co-op stuff…), but it was incredibly cheap.
Funny about Money recently posted…Surprise Surgery!
I suspect that, as with most things and plans, how the baby reacts to them in action will be the deciding factor.
I cloth-diapered (and had two in diapers at the same time). Plus I worked. The studies that assert that disposables are more environmentally friendly were, if I recall, paid for by the disposable manufacturers. I figured we started a college fund with the money we saved.
Try a diaper service–the cost is comparable to disposables. I couldn’t stand the thought of putting that plastic on my babies.
You really need hardly anything for a baby. Ask the eager shoppers to get you things for toddlers–like picture books etc.
frugalscholar recently posted…Frugality: Is it Fun?
I’ve not seen any of the studies, but I imagine we’ll go for whatever LB is happiest in with hopes that it’s the cloth.
You have to put plastic diaper covers over the cloth ones anyway, unless you don’t mind urine leaking out all over you and the furniture.
Diaper service costs must have dropped. But either way, neither a service nor disposables are cheap.
If I were to do it over and were determined to use cloth, I’d wash them and boil them myself. I suspect the diaper rash may have resulted from the detergent the service used. Poor little baby looked like he’d been burned all over his butt.
Washing and boiling diapers is not a joke. But storing several days worth of dirty diapers in a bin in the bathroom, awaiting pickup by the service, isn’t overly pleasant, either.
Each to her own, though: whatever works, works!
Funny about Money recently posted…Surprise Surgery!
I’m another frugal first-time-parent-to-be (due Nov. 13) who just signed up for Amazon Mom. It reduced some stress for me knowing we won’t have to leave the house for whatever we end up needing – it’ll just show up in two days. It may not end up being worth it monetarily, though, and I’m already aghast at all the packaging (even though they’re pretty good about not using a lot of packing material).
We also ended up buying a lot more stuff new than I would have liked to, just because it takes so much time and energy to source stuff used off of Craigslist, etc. Hoping to do some good garage saling this summer for bigger clothes!
Congrats!
The 2 day delivery without needing to leave the house was a big factor for us, I don’t want to pay much more for the convenience but where there’s not much cost differential, we’re doing it. I should compare costs ahead of time š
Well, I’d never heard of amazon mom until just now. They’ve got every market cornered! If you are very clear up front that you would appreciate help with A, B, C and D, you will be surprised how many people would be happy to help.
For example, if I was over visiting a friend and they said, “could I bother you to help me out a TON by doing the dishes for us?” I wouldn’t be bothered AT ALL; or laundry, or whatever. If you know certain people would flip, avoid them, but a lot of people will be perfectly happy to help out and chat.
Anne @ Money Propeller recently posted…What It’s Like to Own Firearms in Canada
Yeah, they really do – though you’d think they’d start making money at some point š
There are some people I know I can directly ask for help, but the others are a bit iffy, I guess.
The disposable vs. cloth thing depends a bit on whether you are in a drought area, too- cloth diapers require a lot of water usage where you are at, whereas disposable diapers consume their water at the site of manufacturing. But I am not longer up to date on the research about environmental impacts of the options, and have no desire to debate this point!
We had our first kid when we lived in an apartment and had one shared washer and dryer for an 8 unit building. There was no way we could do the laundry associated with cloth diapers. We did make use of gDiapers (which are flushable), and actually liked them OK. We used a mix of gDiapers and regular disposables. Not that you were looking for another option! Some people hate gDiapers, but I thought they worked well (particularly for days when we weren’t out and about much) and the little diaper covers were super cute.
Cloud recently posted…Cranky Snippets about Travel
D’you know, that’s an excellent point. Drought vs landfill, it seems like, and I think drought is more pressing at the moment.
I hadn’t heard of gDiapers but hey, why not add another option to consider! š I haven’t burnt out on diapers yet, it seems.
Oh, I meant to say earlier– cloth diapers are surprisingly simple if you’re lazy about them. We did both (and elimination communication). We used BumGenius all-in-ones and Fuzzibunz pocket diapers (AIO are way easier– they work identically to disposibles except you don’t dispose of them, but pockets don’t have to be run in the dryer twice). What we’d do is after they were wet or dirtied, we’d dump the solids in the toilet, then stick the diaper in the washer. When it was time to do the wash, we’d do a cold rinse cycle on just the diapers (and with DC1, anything that had been spit up on recently). Then we’d throw the rest of the laundry in. Then dryer. With AOI, we’d leave the still damp diapers in they dryer with the next cycle.
Obviously it won’t work if you don’t have in-house/in-apartment w/d, but it wasn’t anything like what people talk about with wet buckets and churning and bleach and so on. (And what we’re doing essentially follows the instructions that come with the diapers.)
We didn’t have any luck with gdiapers. They seemed to combine all the cons of old fashioned cloth diapers with not that much benefit. And they leaked a lot.
nicoleandmaggie recently posted…I used to like people more
p.s. With DC1 we had 6 cloth diapers at each size starting when he started solids (beginning with size medium). With DC2 we got 12 new ones right away along with the 6 hand-me-downs. DC2 had all sorts of chemical allergies so we used cloth more frequently in order to avoid rash. They both did disposables at daycare. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, and it is really nice to have cloth diaper back-ups when you run out of disposables.
nicoleandmaggie recently posted…I used to like people more
Good points! Need to compile my notes on the whole thing and make some decisions.
Definitely had the feeling that my aunts were going shopping the moment I got off the phone with them the first time! We will appreciate anything they can offer since we won’t be getting too much in the way of hand-me-downs since no one in my family has had a kid recently (18 years!!!). T’s family is sending some stuff but its coming all the way from across the country so we don’t want them to pay too much in shipping (or for us to pay a lot either). I’m working on the baby registry now and just putting things I think we’ll actually need and not get as a hand-me-down. Not too many things so far š Also, I’m thinking of using a cloth diaper service for at least the first month or so and then I think I’ll try it on my own. The impact to the environment is huge for disposables and even taking into consideration gas that’s involved in the service, still less impact. Of course, I’m not trying to be preachy, its just something I feel strongly about. And, I can certainly understand how it may not be feasible for everyone š
Morgaine recently posted…October 2014 – Budget Update
I wish I could share some of the hand me downs that are starting to come our way – most of them are for the early stage and I know that passes really quickly so we won’t need all that much for so long.
We still haven’t made any firm decision on the diapering, I’d like to do a combo if we can’t do all cloth.