Over at Big Baby Gear headquarters, they have a saying: “you have to go after the first-time parents, because second-time parents aren’t gonna buy she-eet.” They are correct. I bought a lot of stuff. Some things weren’t stupid, and I cherished them. Some things weren’t stupid, but got recalled because of mold concerns. Some things were stupid, and are now covered with dust, and some things were stupid, but I love them and have no regrets.
Those last things are good things to buy for your friends who are having babies, because something which is a waste when you are buying ALL THE THINGS to keep a baby alive is not a waste when you’re just buying one thing for someone else’s kid. Bedazzle that rattle, go to town.
1. This is a baby toothbrush shaped like a banana. When you brush your baby’s teeth with it, you can sing “Brush your teeth / brush your teeth / when it’s time for bed you get to brush your TEETH” from the commercial Tracy Jordan did in that flashback to his childhood or “When you wake up in the morning at a quarter to five and you just can’t wait to come alive / you brush your TEETH / ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch” from Raffi’s “Brush Your Teeth.” Your choice.
2. There is nothing stupid about Halo SleepSack Swaddles. They are brilliant and perfect and life-saving, and I’m only including them in this list because I genuinely want you to buy them and give them to your friends and write poems about them. Not every baby wants to be swaddled, but most do, and once you’ve wrapped and Velcro’d a newborn into a snuggly little burrito and kissed it and watched it drift off to sleep so you can pee alone and eat something and use a grown-up voice, you’ll know where I’m coming from. BLESS YOU, HALO. BLESS YOU. They come in cotton and micro-fleece, depends on what season you’ll need them for, and you can use them until they’re turning over on their own, but I used ours until…oh, man, she could practically say “stop swaddling me.”
3. This is apparently a rainforest mat that plays music and lights up. I say “apparently” because I stripped one of the screws on the battery plate while trying to put batteries in it, so it’s never worked. If I hadn’t just had a baby and lost my will to form coherent plans, I probably would have sent it back. But I just didn’t care, at that point, and my baby used it happily as a static playmat for months, and still likes to hold pretend tea parties on it, even though it’s been dismantled into its various parts.
4. A breathable mesh bumper. I had kind of thought I was going to co-sleep, having gone into this whole process a much bigger hippie than I am now, but my baby had no interest in co-sleeping, ever, preferring to have Personal Space and her own room. So do I! It was great. However, your baby will really enjoy sticking her limbs out of the crib and then howling inconsolably until you tuck them back in, at which point, guess what, out they go again. It’s aggravating! And all the gorgeous bumpers you see in stores are covered with warnings that they are really “for decoration only” and should be taken out when your baby is actually using the crib, because of suffocation. The mesh ones are really boring looking, but they also will not suffocate your baby, which is a plus.
5. Formula. “I’m not going to need that, I’m going to create all the nutrition my infant needs from my breasts! Whatever, I guess I should have one can of poison around in case someone else’s baby visits and his mom doesn’t love him enough to give him God’s Own Nectar.” Hospital-grade pump and fenugreek and nursing vacations and lactation consultants and two months in without ever getting back up to her birth weight, I was ready to be grateful I wasn’t trying to teach her to suckle a goat in a 16th century village. Feed your kid. It’ll be fine. You have clean water? It’s fine. You also don’t need to get fancy with name brands, because the government insists all formula have the same stupid stuff in it, or they can’t sell it to you.
6. Morning sickness drops. They don’t work, and to the extent they DO work, literally any cheap sour candy works just as well. I think they add some Vitamin C and ginger, to make them seem medicinal. Ginger IS pleasant for your stomach when you are nauseated, but really the only thing that works is waiting until you are more pregnant and the symptoms lessen. Unless you have hyperemesis and then you are just fucked. Fun fact about morning sickness: you know how the ONLY good thing about throwing up is that you then feel amazing and relieved for about ten minutes afterwards? That does not happen with morning sickness. You feel just as terrible in the moment after throwing up as you did the moment before you threw up. Yay! These drops were really yummy, though, and it was nice to have an official looking candy dispenser to eat candy from, because when you eat them in public, people make sympathetic noises at you, which is not normally something that happens when you’re eating candy in public early in the morning. ENDORSED.
7. While the rainforest is disappearing, some rainforests are being turned into bouncy things. She loved it, what can I say? You can also crank it to various heights so your kid can use it for a long time. My kid is 2 years old TOMORROW and still weighs only 21 pounds, so she can use it until college. The real feature here is that it’s free-standing, because the doorway ones are a super-pain and then you have a big thing in your doorway, and this one can be placed next to your television so she can use it while you watch Mad Men. Don’t do that! Or, whatever, only do it occasionally, I’m not your mom.
8. A baby rocking chair thing. My version of this did get recalled for the aforementioned mold issues, so I just threw it out, but it was dynamite, and it buzzed and was exactly like the thing Miranda used in SATC, minus the Hitachi Magic Wand, and my kid liked to take naps in it, and I may have rigged a bungee-cord thing so she wouldn’t fall out of it. May have. Kids love vibrating buzzy stuff. This chair was amazing. I genuinely loved it. This kind should not develop mold issues.
9. Alphabet Playmat. Your kid may like it, or may not care, but there is nothing on God’s green earth more soothing than methodically spelling out the alphabet with soft squishy letters that fit together like puzzle pieces, while your child hurricanes around you. A. B. C. D. E. Colors. System. Logic. Bliss.
Next: Ten Stupid Pieces of Baby Gear Which I DO Regret Buying
Take THAT, electronic gadget that reminds you which boob you fed from last. Just erasable magic-marker your tits or make a note on your phone.
Tags: babies, family, no regrets, shopping
There’s…there’s an electronic gadget that reminds you what boob you fed from last? (Duh, Wordsnatcher, of course there is.)
This whole thing has reminded me that I know nothing (nothing, Jon Snow) about babies or baby-rearing and am obviously unqualified to ever have one of my own, which is fine by me. I will revert to buying new parents booze and books.
At first glace, I thought the first thing was a…marital aid of some sort. So yeah, I should never procreate.
Oh, my God, I have to take a picture of the small light-up princess wand my babysitter bought her as a present, because it is absolutely indistinguishable from a pink butt-plug.
Well, you know what they say. Anything can be a dildo if you’re brave enough.
Also, Nicole: I’m a lady without kids and am not planning on having them, but I clicked on this post just like any other on The Toast. Go ahead and post any baby/motherhood stuff that you want because I will still read it. I’m interested in your perspective on life in general, and that includes the parts of your life that I don’t share.
I have a bracelet i move from wrist to wrist, but i really like the idea of writing on my boobs instead.
My friend has a ring she switches every time. She also has a bracelet. Hers are very spare and minimalist and steel cause she’s like that, but I’m so into the idea and mine will be shiiiiiiny. It’s not a push present. IT’S A BOOB REMINDER. Boobs. I could get my fella into that.
wait what on earth is a push present
GUYS, I just told her what it was and her face went DARK. And then I explained what a nursing vacation was.
Push present: a present your partner gives you for pushing out a kid (or being C-sectioned). I didn’t get one.
Nursing vacation: you get into bed, naked, with your naked-except-for-diaper baby, and spend the next, like, two days doing nothing but watching TV and nursing on-demand 24/7 except for bathroom breaks. It will either boost your supply or Yellow Wallpaper you, or both. (I was Yellow Wallpapered by it.)
…is this part of the same thing where people now have “baby name reveal parties” and stuff in the sense that EVERY LITTLE THING is cause for pomp and circumstance because a baby is involved?
Also gender reveal parties, which I realize are a thing now but I still deny on principle.
I feel like gender reveal parties should be pushed back until the child can articulate how they identify.
All I can say is that my sister-in-law had a “gender” reveal party, a baby sprinkle (a small shower) AND just posted a picture of her push present, so I’m going with yes.
Isn’t a “baby sprinkle” what happens when you change a baby boy’s diaper without keeping his ween covered?
…that does not seem to match any definition of the word “vacation” that I have ever, ever heard.
It worked for me, but it is not, I repeat, NOT, a vacation.
…how is a “nursing vacation” *not* the fact that every Saturday my father would take baby me and bottles of pumped milk and go run errands so my mother could do whatever the fuck she wanted (probably sleep)? (He has hilarious stories of being yelled at by little old ladies, which just kind of baffles me because basically everybody of every age I know reacts to this with “AS HE SHOULD, you’re his kid, too!”)
I just grab my boobs to see which one feels fuller, and feed her that one. It seems to work, but it’s a little awkward in public.
Yeah, that’s what I did too. I generally started leaking from the fuller one a good 10 minutes before each feeding though, so that helped. I guess. In the least helpful sense of “helpful.”
My system was: cosleep, so one side got emptied at night, then use the other one exclusively for the just-woke-up and go-to-sleep nursing. Then I could do whatever felt fine all day with no worries.
Of course, having gone into breastfeeding a size 36G, it’s not like a little lopsidedness was going to be that noticeable, anyway.
Hahahah I parsed ‘very spare and minimalist’ as referring to her boobs, then got to ‘steel’ and laughed.
My mom (in 1985) had a tiny brooch (a bear with my birthstone on it’s belly… awww) that she moved from one strap of her bra to the other to let her know which boob was ready to go. Low tech works.
THE ITZBEEN. Oh my god, that thing and its various timers was SUCH a lifesaver. And when I was finally done with it, the kid now uses it as a pretend phone. I buy it for everone.
I don’t have kids, but I have to share this from my mom: Put a safety pin on the bra strap of the most-recently-used boob. Move safety pin after feeding.
Its stories like this that makes me understand why previous generations roll their eyes at the current dependence on technology.
This works except for the fact that I rarely wore a bra for the first two or three weeks. I was also so sleep deprived that I certainly could not have remembered to switch the safety pin, and/or have had the motor skills to manipulate the safety pin mechanism.
Moms of small kids unite! My daughter was only 23 pounds at age 2, and now she’s almost 11 and weighs 54 pounds. I tell her that she needs to eat more peanut butter, or she’ll be in the backseat in a booster seat until high school graduation.
Small kids! Oh, man, I’m just glad I’m not putting her on a glorified fish scale after every nursing session anymore. I didn’t even realize how much of my mental energy was obsessed with her not-starving-to-death at the time. Now, she’s just a small, healthy kid, and I’m okay with it.
I was 30 pounds at age five and 50 when I was ten. Teeny weeny! Growing: it happens! I promise!
Mine is 4 and only 33 pounds. She’s gotten quite tall though. All arms and legs these days. She’s near the 90th percentile for height but not even on the charts for weight. She eats a ton and never seems to gain. Her ped. is fine with it because she’s healthy otherwise. She has always been tiny and I guess I’d rather see her tall and skinny than short and fat…
Can we trade babies, Nicole? Mine hates swaddles with the fire of 10,000 suns. Oh, how we swaddled. Oh, how she screamed. She’s also a tiny hippie who wants nothing more than to co-sleep forever, probably until she hits puberty. I resist but she usually wins out for the last couple hours of each night.
OK, I don’t really want to trade babies. Much. Maybe at night.
Aww, I love your tiny hippie baby. I totally won the baby lottery and have no wish to trade either, but I do wish she was more of a cuddler. Now that she’s older, she’ll say “snugglebear!” and wrap herself around me briefly, but she’s mostly a “I go forth and will return with honour” wee thing.
Snugglebear!! Dying of cuteness. It is definitely a mixed bag with the snuggling, because even though I sleep like shit with her next to me, it is kind of sweet. At almost-4-months, she’s already pissy that she can’t sit up without help, so I expect that once she’s mobile I’ll never see her again.
Also the Canadian spelling of ‘honour’ totally ups the dignity of your baby by like 400%.
I have one of those, too, Nicole. She’s 17 months old and, as of late, has started running at me while I’m doing dishes, wrapping her arms around my legs, and burying her face in my butt. Sometimes, so overwhelmed with affection is she, that she bites said butt. I know love when I see it, but her grandmothers keep trying to kiss her.
Oh man the rainforest bouncy thing! We called it Vegas and my kid loved it like someone’s grandma at the slots. My kid is unfortunately freakishly large and we’re counting down the days til he weighs too much for it.
Also, whoever came up with the phrase “nursing vacation” deserves to be kicked in the shins.
IT IS NOT A VACATION.
I don’t want to harsh on nursing, nursing is great, and I wish I’d had a better experience and will try to go into it for round two (when that day arrives) with the same resolve I did the first time around, because many many women report having totally different success rates with different pregnancies. But in retrospect, I was so depressed and guilty and sad and filled with self-hatred about not being able to feed my baby like my mom fed me that it became something that actively detracted from my experience of new motherhood, and I refuse to let it impact my self-worth in that way again. It’s a medical issue, it’s not a personal failing. Type 1 diabetics don’t hate themselves because their pancreas sucks.
This is also why I hate people (like myself before I had a baby) who talk about how most women don’t try hard enough. Not because I tried SO HARD, because I fucking did, but because formula combined with clean water is a totally valid substitute for breastmilk, and the world is too terrible a place to waste your scorn on women who choose to use it. Mind your own business.
I’M OUT.
oh man, my sister had a baby this summer…she cannot breastfeed because of the meds she takes. no big deal, right? Sure, she was a little disappointed bc she wanted to breastfeed, but hey, doc says no, doc says no. Ain’t no thing….except her asshole alcoholic boyfriend/ex-boyfriend/whatever threw a FUCKING FIT. As if he (who was not there to take her to the hospital when she went into labor because he was out drinking) had any right to say A GODDAMN THING.
I was so proud of my sister when she told him to shut the fuck up, it’s her kid, if he wants to breastfeed then he’s more than welcome to do it himself. SO PROUD.
go your sister!
It’s not even that it’s NOT a vacation– it’s that you so, so, so desperately NEED a vacation and all you get is this shitty non-vacation imposter.
We ended up being able to figure out nursing after many weeks and lots of crying and a fairly significant amount of formula. I tried as hard as it was possible for me to try, which is still less hard than many women I know, and it happened to work out for us. But christ, it was not easy, and if I hadn’t felt so guilty and sad and messed up about it I might have been able to enjoy that time a little bit more.
I think the people who talk about how women must have figured out breastfeeding before formula existed forget that actually a lot of babies died before formula existed and maybe we don’t need to live that way anymore.
I gave The Bergy Bits all the milk I made, but it wouldn’t have been enough to keep them alive and only lasted 6 weeks anyway. They were actually FORBIDDEN by the doctor from breastfeeding exclusively because they needed to gain weight fast (due to being extremely premature), so they were on a formula that was higher in calories than breastmilk.
TL;DR: My babies DEFINITELY would have died without formula. yay formula!
Word. I breastfeed now, but at the beginning, a preemie who couldn’t suck + a very, very bad case of jaundice before my milk came in = formula in an eyedropper. It saved her. I’m not going to side-eye anyone else for using it.
Definitely lots more infant mortality, not to mention that women with complications (that would have killed them in the past) tend to have more compliations. That said, when my mother was a lactation consultant with WIC, she reported that her clients who were immigrants from countries where breastfeeding was the norm seemed to have an easier time with it. I imagine growing up seeing it every day and having lots of friends and family you can ask for advice helps a ton.
Yes, lack of support is a huge factor in breastfeeding not working out! I was super lucky that it went smoothly for me without help, but if I hadn’t had my pro-breastfeeding-but-not-in-a-pressurey-way family I might have easily been discouraged by the bitchy nurse at the hospital who told me I was being silly by not letting her take my son to the nursery for a bottle of formula.
My plan if breastfeeding didn’t work out was to loudly yell “MY BODY, MY CHOICE” at anyone who questioned me about it. I figured at the very least it’d confuse them long enough for me to escape.
You published your “On Being Unexpectedly Crummy at Breastfeeding” on The Hairpin about three months before my kid was born. I read it and enjoyed it. Then my kid was born and I, too, was Unexpectedly Crummy at Breastfeeding. Then I re-read it and NEEDED it. So thank you for that. And, like others have been saying elsewhere in these comments, any and all parenting content is so very welcome. Don’t hesitate for a second.
That means a lot to me, thank you for telling me. Not about the parenting content, but that the breastfeeding piece helped you. I was still pretty raw when I wrote it, and it makes me really happy to think that it made anyone feel less shitty in that moment in their lives.
Your parenting stuff on the Hairpin saved my life/sanity – and I don’t think that’s even an exaggeration. I’ve said this before, I only mention it publicly again as an exhortation for all the Toasty parents who may not have read it to seek it out.
Loving you a little bit more than usual for specifically saying clean water here.
RE: different babies, different results.
So I had this kid. Like ten minutes later, they were wheeling me up to our room, and he was nursing, and I was The Most Amazing Mom On The Planet (2:40 am edition) We co-slept and nursed for the next couple of years, easy-peasy, why do you people act like it’s difficult? He even went so far as to develop his first teeth at 4 months old, i.e., still young enough to train him not to use my nipples as a teething ring.
So then I had this other kid. We didn’t make it out of the hospital before I was in tears about him not ‘getting’ nursing. I was calling the lactation lady at odd hours, and digging out bottles in the middle of the night, and sending the spouse out for different kinds of formula, because he wouldn’t take the first one, and in general living in postpartum hell. If I hadn’t had 30 months of successful nursing experience in my life, it never would have worked. If he hadn’t been over 9 pounds of chunky fat reserves at birth, it never would have worked. A couple of weeks into his life, we had it mostly figured out, and I nursed him for 2 1/2 years, too, but got to “enjoy” all of the biting and clogged ducts and wearing cabbage on my boobs and purple stains and there was something about sheep’s wool too? that I bypassed with the first kid.
Trying hard is a ridiculous piece of advice. Massive support from concerned and knowledgeable people who give you massages and make sure you shower regularly and promise you that the baby isn’t about to starve to death is helpful, but even then, there is only so much stress your life needs, and is this battle so vital that it deserves so much of your stress resources? It is not. Feed the baby, something healthy, and bliss out on his happy face.
We don’t do a lot of baby and kid stuff on the site, but we know a lot of you are moms and dads, so feel free to use these monthly-ish baby or kid posts I’ll be doing to talk about anything parenting-related you want!
I’m not really going to be writing about my kid, just some aspects of being a mother, and I think it’ll be fun and low-key and enjoyable and non-judgey for those of us who have decided to populate the earth with our little beasts.
I’m really excited about this content, sparse though it may be! I just found out I’m pregnant, and there’s not a lot of smart, funny parenting-related stuff on the web, it’s mostly medical fear-mongering, judging/condescending, or really dry. (The Bump, ughh.) Anyone know of a good Toast-ish online community for parenting?
Our publisher, Grey Worm, is always bitching at me to start an all-parenting site as a sister site for The Toast, I just don’t care enough about parenting to do it, but we’ll be looking to see how much parenting content people want on the site, and writing accordingly. I find plenty of stuff about parenting interesting, but since most of my opinions are: “whatever, it’s not my kid,” they don’t lend themselves well to a whole site.
I don’t have any kids (except cats, but they refuse to be swaddled) and neither do any of my friends, however I would read everything on the Toast about motherhood. I need the Toast perspective to counteract that horrifying ending of Larsen’s Quicksand and all media/nonfeministy portrayals of “bump watch, postbaby body miracles, why aren’t you feeding your kid like alicia silverstone”, etc.
If there was ever a specific parenting-related offshoot of The Toast I would love to write for it on a semi-regular basis. *slinks away awkwardly*
Ditto here. I mean, maybe not regularly, because I’m busy parenting and wifing and working and, you know, living and stuff, but I have Thoughts About Being a Mother.
I kind of feel like I know a lot of moms who could really do with a parenting website where the stated philosophy was “whatever, it’s not my kid.” I personally occasionally browse through parenting websites and am sort of shocked by how many articles that start out with the “hey, this was my experience” premise wind up at “and since I had this experience you should learn from me and do exactly what I did or else you will be a bad parent.”
But I would read the hell out of all the articles on just . . . hey, this is me, being a parent, parenting is weird and hard and excellent, what’re you doing over there? That’s cool too.
Dooce is a blog that is written by a writer/blogger/mom and she talks about parenting a lot. There is a forum-y component but I don’t read it so dunno about all that. Though I am not (even close to being) a parent, I like her blog. Funny, pretty honest, nice photos of dogs and kiddos.
Stella, do you know Offbeat Families? They just stopped publishing (right when I started to need them!), but the archives are full of good, reasonable, low-key, creative advice. Like this post, which I am rereading right now in preparation for telling my family I’m pregnant: http://offbeatfamilies.com/2012/05/youll-seeee
And if you find any good communities, will you let me know?
Will do 🙂 Haven’t heard of Offbeat Families, but I’ll check them out now!!
I’m not a parent but I love the podcast One Bad Mother and recommend it to everyone. It’s really funny and down to earth and they cover a lot of different topics from a progressive, feminist perspective. They did an awesome two-part series on gender recently where they interviewed a trans* parent and talked about the weird things people said when they revealed what gender baby they were having.
Yay! (Although I would also like to read about Child of the Toast)
You mean Crouton?
I don’t have a baby, nor do I intend to have one, but I will always read your perspective on life because you are funny and smart and the internet and universe need more people talking sanely about motherhood and stuffs.
No baby or baby plans, but I like reading about this stuff so I’m looking forwards to it!
I literally just added half of these things to my baby registry. Thanks!
Nursing bracelet that tracks boob and time: http://www.milkbands.com/
Indispensible with my first. With my second I ended up using an app.
Oh man, the vibrating seat. We never would have thought to buy one on our own, and some friends passed theirs down and I want to kiss the hem of their garments in gratitude. He is not so into it now, and we are petrified as to what comes next… Guys, what comes after the bouncy seat ?
The rainforest bouncy thing comes after the bouncy seat! You’ll be okay! I don’t know what comes after the rainforest bouncy thing, though, and I’m a little afraid.
That enormous rainforest thing, as soon as he can keep his head up and slap at stuff to make it move. We got lucky that a friend’s absentee grandma felt guilty and bought them one, and we got to use it until our kid was too big for it and then it fit theirs perfectly. Downside: ours walked at 10 months.
Oh man, I had alllll those things, plus a million more. Semi-useless baby items are the best way to feel like a good mom without having to do too much actual momming! My little dude loved his playmat (also sans batteries – really, leaving the batteries out of noisy toys is the only way to go): http://i.imgur.com/Zc16egq.jpg
And of course the battery operated swing, and the jumperoo (aka the Glorious Circle of Neglect), but he seemed happiest in his vibrating chair: http://i.imgur.com/LoMQmS7.jpg
And as soon as he got more mobile he would put himself in the dog crate: http://i.imgur.com/iVVifB6.jpg
The crate is still a favorite nap spot now that he’s 21 months, which is awesome, except that I feel like I should probably feel more bad about that?
A thumbs-up is not enough to express my love of that picture of the baby in the dog crate. It’s cool. Exposure to animals equals less allergies or something, right? This is what I tell myself when the dog licks my baby on the face.
I think you have won the baby lottery. CRATES HIMSELF. SLEEPS IN A SAFE AND CONTAINED LOCATION. I’m not seeing a downside here.
ahahahahahaaaaaaawwwwwwwww. The cutest.
Battery removal is essential for maintaining those last shreds of parental sanity that remain after the sleep deprivation.
hahaha. My (lovely) mother in law keeps getting us things that light up and/or make noise, and I just wait until she’s gone and either hide them, or remove the batteries (though some of them seem impenetrable).
Relevant Scrubs clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sWMm0UE1AU
The S is missing. Nicole. Where is the S. This is not soothing at all. WHERE IS THE S.
Cosign SO HARD on the sleepsack. indispensable (provided your baba is pro-swaddling of course)
Another benefit of the playmat puzzle thingy is that they are EASILY WASHABLE which comes in handy considering how many different liquids and almost-liquids come out of or off of a baby at any given time, PLUS they are usable for a really really long time – first as a play surface and later to learn letters, build forts and so on.
This post is Relevant to My Interests. Hoooo boy. I have no idea where to go for sane pregnancy/baby prep online. And my best friends are as-yet childless. One told me this weekend she really likes the look of those “high, minimalist, small profile strollers.” (She’s a designer and lives in a fancy nieghborhood). I used Google images and figured out she meant the Orbit, platinum-lined stroller of the stars ($1k, to start, no joke).
I HATE MY STROLLER. It has so many design flaws. I’ll be writing about it.
My #firstworldproblem is that my double stroller only has three cupholders. (Single strollers usually have one for baby and two for the parents.) THERE ARE FOUR PEOPLE USING THIS STROLLER, WHO HAS TO SHARE THEIR DRINK?
All strollers are THE WORST. I have 5 and I hate all of them. Admitting that makes me feel like the worst kind of yuppie though. The only half decent stroller of my collection is the Chariot, which is only good if you never plan on going indoors or down a crowded sidewalk, which, as if. I thought I would become athletic after I had a baby. Heh.
I live in Detroit and all I see downtown here are those simple strollers that are basically a few sticks and a piece of cloth, then I go out to the suburbs and it seems like a stream of giant expensive strollers emerging from giant expensive SUVs, Russian nesting doll-style, and my fear of never being able to afford a baby comes flooding back.
At a mall in the northern suburbs, I once saw a stroller that cost $2,500 and a purse dog with feather hair extensions in the same visit. I’m still recovering.
HELLO FELLOW DETROIT TOASTER :DDDD
Hello!! Are there many of us!?
DOG WITH HAIR EXTENSIONS?!? *faints*
Best friend is pregnant with twins. This is so timely and helpful for me because I do not now and never will have a baby so product reviews from people who do are welcome ANYTIME.
I own almost all of those things (including the banana.)
Tip to expectant moms who don’t think they’ll be breastfeeding for whatever reason (they are all valid reasons): you can register for formula on Amazon. Don’t be ashamed to ask people to buy it for you. It’s expensive. After you get people to buy it for you, you can buy it in bulk from Costco. We asked our pediatrician and she said it’s the same damn thing as Enfamil.
Also, every doctor and hospital and everything else will give you free samples (you will probably have to ask), and you can also mail away to all of the formula brands and ask them for samples, which they will give you lots of, plus coupons. I breastfed 90% of the time and supplemented with formula when it started to make me suicidal or when I left the kidlet with a sitter, and I never spent a penny on it because I got so many free samples.
I was slightly let down by how many free samples I got from the pediatrician but we got enough that the shameful asking for free shit at least paid off once.
EXCEPTION: I delivered via the midwives unit at an (amazing, wonderful, supportive, can’t praise it enough generally) Baby-Friendly Hospital (an official designation), which deliberately refused to give out formula samples and was pretty hard-core on the topic, so not all hospitals will provide formula. (You can DEFINITELY get tons of full-size samples from the formula companies.)
I think it’s better for care providers to err on the side of being really encouraging and supportive of breastfeeding than to be “oh, your baby cried so I gave her 3oz of Enfamil, sorry,” but I do think it places poorer women who are not going to be able to breastfeed in a more difficult financial situation. You can talk all you want on lactation forums (racist-ly) about mythical “African” women who have literally no concept of money and breastfeed for free all day long, but if you are living in the United States and have to go back to your job as a gas station attendant after six weeks of unpaid leave, and your “pumping station” is an unlocked outdoor toilet, you are probably going to have to give your baby formula, and it is classist as shit to suggest otherwise.
This is not to suggest that formula companies are trying to help out impoverished moms. They most DEFINITELY want moms to come to rely on their product. This is a complicated and difficult issue with many variables.
This is exactly the kind of parenting POV I’d like to see more of. A lot of the current published parenting stuff in print and online is super classist, and really aimed squarely at affluent white straight people.
This is why you need to have more parenting pieces on The Toast – there is so much hateful discourse out there on parenting, and so much of it as dressed up as feminist and “natural” and blah blah, when really it’s not. So yay! (Also I am de-lurking to make this comment and tell you that this site is great and also I have a two year old so I am interested in All The Things plus Parenting.)
Thank you ! This is exactly the piece I have been asking my recent baby-having friends to write for me, and they all keep promising to, but, they have little babies. Exactly what I’ve been looking for as I sit here at 24 weeks trying to distract myself from my grinding nausea.
Fenugreek is why I can no longer eat pancakes. That stuff worked for me, but man, I smelled like a gross sweaty IHOP for a few months.
I honestly thought it would not make ME smell like maple syrup, because the idea that something I ate could fundamentally change the way I smelled was so obviously insane, even though obviously it was I who was the insane one. And then it made me smell like hot maple syrup.
Wait, what about the SnotSucker?? It LOOKS like a ridiculous piece of baby equipment, but it is seriously the best thing ever, once you get past the part where you are literally sucking snot out of your baby’s nose.
In a particularly dark episode (“April”), I finally convinced a nurse in our pediatrician’s office to admit that the bulb syringes don’t do anything.
SnotSucker for life.
The NoseFrida is disgusting and awesome. I’m pretty sure with an impending #2, I’m going to completely throw dignity out the window and buy a Windi, too.
Those must be newer than the 8 years ago when I last had a newborn. I Googled it and they look awesome though. Now a weird little part of me wonders if I could use it on myself when allergy season gets really bad.
I did use our NoseFrida on me. It did not work as well as hoped.
If you have a gassy or colicky kid, maybe it’s total hippie bullshit, but a fellow Tumblr mom turned me onto ColiCalm, a homeopathic remedy you can get on Amazon, and I love it so terribly much. G was a colicky, well, is it rude to call an infant an asshole? Because the first 4-6 months (I don’t remember, there was a lot of crying on both our parts and some serious PPD and no napping) were absolute hell filled with a screaming child who could only calm down with the application of ColiCalm. The 5 Ss didn’t do shit, but a dropper of CC was magic and kept me from leaving him at a fire station.
My mum regularly referred to me as an asshole baby due to colic. She makes no apologies for it and I don’t want her to – it’s not like being gassy was my fault either.
Toddlers: also assholes according to most young parents I know.
I feel like I “get” Stockholm Syndrome after parenting a toddler. What an adorable little tyrannical assface.
RE: the pregnancy drops: I tried them last time and they didn’t do shit. This time I’m doing B6 and B12 and those fancy lemon hard candies in the pretty French tin, and it’s a little better. I’m still dismayed I can’t sleep through the first 20 weeks, though.
I wish I’d had the mesh thing for our crib. my kid kept getting his limps wedged between the bars and howling bloody murder. When we tried to convert the crib into a toddler bed, we found that it had been recalled because kids were getting their limbs stuck between the bars… and breaking both their limbs and the thick wooden bars of the bed. HA HA WHAT HOW WHAT.
I got THREE. THREE Mobywraps before the kid was born, and our hospital system and midwives greatly encouraged it. There used to be a wonderful store in Seattle that carried every conceivable type of baby wearing gear, and the owner helped me situate my 12 pound month old chunk in a Beco and he dozed off within five minutes. Bless it. And it's machine-washable organic cotton. Best $160 ever.
I think we've used our stroller twice in five months. Wearing the kid is hands-down the easiest option when you live in a fourth-floor walkup!
Yes, I agree with that 1st one Banana toothbrush. But apart from that all are useful. I already used that all the things. Even they liked it a lot. Don’t think so, there anything wrong with it.