Overshopping for Baby?

What equipment is necessary? What stuff can you do without?

Is anything essential?

When my partner and I were shopping for our first baby, we were pretty shocked by the sticker prices on baby furniture and equipment. After all, every one knew that you had to have a crib, high chair, change table, car seat, exersaucer, playpen and 500 other things!

And... you had to have them NOW! Don't wait until after you have the baby, then it will be too late.

Well, we got them and had the lovely nursery all set up and ready to go before our son was born. We felt financially crippled but prepared.

Fast forward to our first day home with the baby. We walked in the door, exhausted but exhilarated with our new status as parents.

We walked into the nursery, showed our wee lad his knew bed, furniture and toys and then brought him to our room for a nap. We had our brand new playpen with the handy dandy bassinet feature set up in our room so that breastfeeding could be established as easily as possible and so we wouldn't be separated by a whole room.

Fast forward 6 months, turns out baby was still in our room, co sleeping now (we got way more sleep doing this then having to get up for each feeding) and being changed in the bassinet instead of napping there.

All that equipment? Collecting dust.

The only thing we used regularly was the car seat (for obvious reasons).

The highchair was a useful tea towel drying rack, the stroller stayed in the shed and kept the bicycles company.

We had spent a ridiculous amount of money on clutter that we didn't need.

The moral of this story? What you think may be the essential basic of baby care... may just be what the retailers have been drilling into your head. Ask any parents and they will have a laundry list of useless junk that was a waste of money.

Ann Douglas, who writes The Mother of All Baby Columns demonstrates how to assess whether a product is a need or another way to drain your wallet;

"To give you some practice in the art of navigating the baby store aisles, I invited a group of parents and other experts to critique five undesirable products.

The product: The Babyoom, a four-in-one car seat, stroller, tricycle, and shopping cart designed by Jeong Haedong & Bae Junseong.

The concept: This sounds like such a great idea. Instead of purchasing individual pieces of baby gear that become obsolete, you purchase a single product that grows with your child. The car seat morphs into a stroller then into a tricycle, eventually becoming a shopping cart.

The verdict: As eye-catching as this may be, it fails the functionality test. “The design is pretty, but I want my infant facing me in a stroller, the cart would never hold enough groceries for the average North American trip to the store, and the tricycle looks like it’s missing a seat,” says Allison McDonald, mother of two and founder of the preschool activity blog No Time for Flash Cards. “I like the idea of multiple uses, but my gut (tells me) they missed the mark."

Applying some commonsense to your shopping will save you money in the long run as well having to dust extra useless paraphernalia.

Ashley

Over The Top Nursery, By allspice1 Andy