The parenthood/baby industry is a huge one, and one that makes baby product manufacturers a fortune. However, a lot of it at the end of the day is extremely misleading, and here’s what I’d have changed if I knew better.
- Forget the Graco Infant Car Seat and Snap N Go. It’s a complete waste of money and is used rather infrequently. Why not buy a Britax Marathon and use that throughout? After all, you can use it rear facing between 5-40 lbs and then front facing through 70lbs, and you can’t go front-facing until they’re a year old anyway, so that’s fine. When you live in a small cramped NYC apartment especially, having an extra infant car seat and the associated Snap N Go is not worth it. We don’t have a good place to store this thing. Sure, there’s the convenience of carrying the carseat from car to stroller, but you can do it with a lighter load — the baby — directly to a City Mini.
- I think I’d consider a different baby monitor. The Summer Infant Video Monitor set is ridiculously expensive, and it does have a pretty decent monitor especially in darkness — when it works and when the baby is close by. However, the static is awful. There are very few positions that this thing works properly in, and we’ve had a lot of sleepless nights as a result of the quality. Also, the real catch is that the baby does need to be close by — this thing has 3 feet (if that) of visibility, so if the baby is on the other side of the crib, you won’t see him/her.
- Bottles! I learned from the lactation consultant that the best bottles have the Playtex NaturaLatch — and they should be slow flows. If you’re a parent and the milk is coming out of the side of your kid’s mouth when he takes the bottle, you will benefit from this much better bottle nipple set up. We wasted so much milk the other way! The unfortunate part of this is that you can’t use any other bottle types, so we had to toss away our Avent, Born Free, and other bottles, but we really did enjoy the entire Playtex Drop-Ins system (it was easier than worrying about cleaning bottles all the time).
- Exersaucers are a complete waste of money. I think my kid tolerated it for a total of one hour total during his entire life. I see more parents giving it away on my neighborhood’s mailing list than keeping it.
- The Boppy pillow is good in theory, but I never benefited from it. Maybe it’s because I never successfully breast-fed.
- Toys! This kid is more interested in remote controls and phones. Who needs toys?
The items I really appreciated are:
- The Baby Sleep Solution was a really good book that helped us sleep train our son. I gave it to my friend and she benefited from it as well.
- We love our City Mini. The quick-to-fold feature is awesome.
- The Graco Blossom 4-in-1 Highchair was the best thing we could ever have used as a high-chair. It’s also great for having guests over with babies — there’s an extra booster seat so you can take it anywhere. Also, as someone who keeps a kosher home, we love that we can use the smaller tray for dairy food and the larger tray for meat food.
- For the 10 months that I did “breast feed,” I absolutely needed the Medela Symphony. It’s definitely not the cheapest breast pump — the contrary, actually — but it was amazing. Using that together with the Easy Expressions Hands Free Pumping Bra let me get work done without missing a beat.
All in all, parenthood is a good learning experience in saving money. 😉
It’s funny, we LOVED our Graco car seat and snap n go. So much so that we had two bases for it – one for the car and one for inside the house, so we could stroll him to sleep (this happened because we forgot the base once while on vacation – necessitating buying a 2nd – but we were happy to have them both). We are, however, car people in the urban ‘burbs – so being able to take Aaron in and out of the car asleep was key. We called it “the bucket” and we were so sad on the day we gave the bucket away to a newborn, losing that seamless carrying ability.