Valerie's Guide to Baby Gear

Car Seats

You can buy an infant car seat or a convertible car seat. Infant seats are the ones you see people carrying babies around in. They look like a box with a handle. Convertible seats stay in the car and aren’t designed for carrying the baby around. An infant seat will last for about a year; a convertible seat will last for much longer. But! I recommend getting an infant seat and a convertible seat because an infant seat is incredibly convenient. Infants doze on and off all day. If you have an infant seat, you can take the baby out of the car and into the house without waking it up. Also, it means that you always have a safe, comfortable, place for the baby to sit when you are out and about. Look for a five-point safety harness because that is the safest kind.

I've noticed that first-time parents move their baby from an infant seat to a toddler seat early, while experienced parents keep their children in the infant seat for as long as possible.

Look at the weight and height limit for an infant seat you are considering. Today's babies are often 25 pounds by the end of the first year, while many infant seats are designed only for infants up to 20 pounds. If there's any chance that your baby may be a large one, it might be worth seeking out one of the few car seats that holds babies up to 22 or 25 pounds.

Beware Evenflo car seats. They’ve had way too many recalls for me to feel comfortable with them.

The website www.carseat.org is very worthwhile reading. It has tons of things that people don’t know about car seat safety. Most car seats are used incorrectly. Most parents believe they are using them correctly!

We got a free car seat inspection from our local police department. Many police departments and Chrysler Dealers offer these, for free. I was sure our toddler seat was installed correctly, but they found lots of things that were either wrong or could have been done better. So, I highly recommend getting your car seat installation inspected even if you think it is installed correctly. This might be worth doing with the empty car seat before the baby is born.

Another important feature to look at is how you adjust the length of the straps. You'll need to be changing these a lot, both because the baby grows and also because each day the baby will be wearing different layers of warm clothes, depending on the weather, and you'll need to adjust the straps accordingly. Some of our car seats (we currently own four) have straps that can be adjusted by pressing a button between the baby's feet and pulling on the straps. This is easy and wonderful. Others of our car seats need to be taken apart, and the child removed, so that you can reposition strap lengths behind the back of the seat. This is a complicated process, usually involving two parents (one to watch the baby while the other adjusts the straps). I very strongly prefer the car seats with the easily adjustable strap lengths.

Get a stroller base for the infant seat, so you can take it out of the car and put it on wheels. The car seat can get really heavy and frustrating to carry around. We didn’t have wheels for our car seat for our first child, but I wished we did. For our second child we got a stroller that the car seat can snap into, and wow, this is one of my very favorite pieces of baby gear.

Clothes

We almost entirely put our babies into shirts that snap at the crotch ("onesies"). It’s extremely rare for us to put the baby in a shirt that ends at the waist. This is for two reasons. One is that shirts that end at the waist are going to ride up and expose the baby’s belly, which means that either the baby is chilly or you have an endless task to repeatedly re-tuck the shirt in. The other reason is that I’ve heard too many stories about babies taking off their diapers and finger painting the room with its contents. I dread having a baby ever do that. Always having snaps keeps the baby from having access to the diaper tapes.

If your baby is like my two, the first diaper or two are going to be full of so much meconium that it runs over. Meconium (the stuff that is in babies’ intestines before they are born and switch to making real poops) leaves permanent stains on clothes. So you don’t want to immediately put your newborn into the cutest outfit you own.

You don’t need baby shoes.

For some reason, people gave us a ton of socks. We almost never used socks on either of our babies when they were tiny.

To keep our first baby warm when we went outside, we had a baby-bag bunting. We would wedge him into it, then put it into the car seat. Bad idea! A much better idea is to get one of those warm covers that snaps onto the car seat rather than onto the baby. It is much easier to put the baby into the car seat and then put the cover on, rather than getting little arms and legs into little arm and leg holes every time you want to go out. Also, it is much safer not to have too much padding on the baby. When we had our car seat inspected, they told us that the baby's snowsuit was dangerous because it put too much padding between the baby and the straps. These car seat covers let the straps get closer to the baby -- they don’t go between the baby and the straps -- which is safer.

Crib Stores will sell you all sorts of fluffy stuff to put in your crib. Fluffy soft stuff is dangerous! Soft stuff in the crib is associated with a higher risk of sudden infant death syndrome. The safest crib is one with a firm mattress and NOTHING ELSE inside it. No soft toys. No stuffed animals. No blankets! Put your baby to sleep in a blanket sleeper rather than under blankets. Don’t put blankets in the crib. Put the baby to sleep on its back. That’s a very good way to reduce the chance of SIDS.

Look for crib sheets with very deep pockets that stay on the mattress better than typical crib sheets do. Babies have been known to strangle on their sheets. The ones with the deep pockets are much less likely to get loose and cause problems.

My first baby never liked his crib. With both babies, we ended up with the baby sleeping on a futon in his or her own room. Your mileage will probably vary. I’ve seen suggestions to get a very sturdy crib because it will last through several children, all of whom will be spending a lot of time there. I’ve seen suggestions to get a firm and sturdy mattress to make the crib more comfortable. Maybe if we had done these things the crib would have worked out. Maybe not. I’m glad we didn’t spend a lot of money on it.

Diapers

I did a lot of reading about cloth diapering, bought a bunch of cool high-tech cloth diapers, and hated them. Disposables keep your baby much dryer, which in turn prevents diaper rash. (Though actually the number one cause of diaper rash is be poop next to the baby’s skin.) Recent environmental comparisons show that cloth and disposable diapers actually have about the same impact on the environment, so it’s not like if you use disposables you will be single-handedly trashing the planet. Washing diapers is no fun, and so is sanitizing them, removing poop stains from them, soaking them before washing, and so on. Cloth diapers leak more, so you have to do more other types of cleanup too.

Here's a list of some advantages of cloth or disposable diapering. We ended up choosing disposables, but your mileage may vary:

Disposables	Cloth
Much less laundry! Less likely to leak. Keeps baby dryer. Baby needs fewer diaper changes. Baby is dryer, so there is less chance of diaper rash. Less interaction with contents of diaper pail -- you don't have to soak, bleach, sanitize, wash, dry, and maybe fold them.	Less expensive. Fewer weird chemicals up against your baby's skin. Less garbage to put out. You're not adding to the landfill problem.

A diaper tip: If you have a boy baby, point his penis downward when you diaper him. Otherwise his diapers will leak.

It is worth having maybe 50 newborn-sized disposable diapers on hand when your baby arrives. The newborn ones have a little cut-out for the baby’s umbilical cord stump, so the diaper doesn’t bonk into it. Someone gave these to us, and I found I was really glad to have them. However, you probably don't want more than 50, because babies grow into new diaper sizes surprisingly quickly.

Just so you know: Newborn babies poop in wild colors! Most poops from newborns are mustardy yellow, but sometimes they "do" brown or even green. The first time my first baby made a green poop I called the doctor thinking that he had caught some horrible infection. Nope! It is normal for babies to make green poops. The poop might also be anything from muddy to stringy or seedy. It’s OK. The colors of poop that are not OK are red and black.

The sizes printed on diaper packages are a fantasy. If your baby’s diapers are leaking regularly, it is time to move up a size. It took me a while to believe this one, but it is very true. My kids usually have moved up to the next size when they are about half-way through the weight-range of the previous size. Babies generally go really fast through sizes 1 through 3, then spend forever in size 4.

In case you’re wondering: Babies get toilet trained at about age 3. Or so I’ve read. And boys tend to get toilet trained later than girls. My theory is that this is because their muscles are different.

After a fruitless shopping quest for a diaper pail, we got one from a diaper service. We called them up and asked if they could sell us one. They charged us $12 (an excellent price) and delivered it to our door! I like our diaper pail. Jan says it is smelly. I don’t smell it. Some people prefer a Diaper Genie to prevent leakage of smells. Other people hate Diaper Genies. A Diaper Genie is a sort of a garbage pail where you drop a diaper in a hole in the top, then twist, and the diaper is encased in a tube of plastic. You end up with long "sausages" of encapsulated diapers. If you use one, you have to buy Diaper Genie refills. I’m told those are vaguely expensive. There’s another gizmo like a Diaper Genie that uses ordinary plastic grocery bags instead of proprietary bags. That seems much cheaper. I’ve heard some reports that those break easily, though.

Speaking of diaper services, I read that modern-day diaper service has changed. Evidently if you prefer disposable diapers to cloth they now will also deliver cheap disposable diapers right to your door. These are some weird off-brand, but I’ve heard people say good things about them. This might be worth investigating. On the other hand, we’ve been really happy with Huggies, or sometimes Pampers.

Tip: Jan noticed that the diaper changing stations in men’s rooms are much cleaner than the ones in women’s rooms, so he decided that he would do most of our kids' diaper changes when we are in places that have baby changing stations.

Some of our relatives gave us some Balmex ointment at our baby shower. They swear by it as a cure for diaper rash. I don’t know whether our kids have been naturally rash-free babies or if it’s today’s diapers or if it’s the Balmex, but both our kids have indeed had almost no diaper rashes ever. Anytime we see any red skin during a diaper change, we put Balmex on it and it magically is back to being normal skin the next time we look at it. So we love Balmex too.

Breastfeeding

You might want to read my Valerie's Thoughts About Breastfeeding page. There's lots more information there.

The standard recommendation is to have 2-3 nursing bras. One of the best brands of nursing bras is reported to be Bravado. I bought mine in a size that was too small, so they were never comfortable and they were very warm in the summertime. I ended up going braless for a while, then switching back to a new larger size of the floppy non-underwire bras that I had been wearing before I got pregnant. I recommend getting 2-3 Bravado nursing bras (if you get ones that fit you you're likely to have a better experience with them than I did) and then see where you want to go from there. New moms change bra sizes at a fast and furious rate, so you don't want to stock up on bras too much until you're fairly stable. I ended up going braless for a while with each baby. I don't think most people do that, but it worked well for me.

You don’t need special nursing clothes. But you can spend an awful lot of money on them if you want. The one exception is that I miss wearing dresses. I recommend buying one really nice nursing dress, because it’s nice to be able to go out to places in a dress and be able to feed your baby. The classic place to buy very high quality, comfortable, good-looking nursing clothes is Motherwear: www.motherwear.com. They have a nice printed catalog in addition to their website. I've found nursing clothes on eBay at good prices.

For my first baby, I bought an Avent Isis breast pump, so that I could pump some milk and then leave a bottle home with Jan while I was out for an evening now and then. It worked OK, but I found that it was slower than I'd have liked, plus the repetitive wrist action you need to use with it seemed like it could cause repetitive motion injuries, plus after a while it stopped working for me, so I don’t recommend it. I recommend springing for the $210 Medela Pump-In-Style. This is a very popular electric pump that is usually recommended for moms who go back to work and pump breastmilk at work. I've heard that these hold their resale value well and so you can sell it on eBay for a goodly percentage of what you paid for it (though when I checked on eBay they seemed to be going for about $50 each). For that matter, you could probably also buy one -- or most any other baby gear -- on eBay. The reason why I recommend getting such a fancy pump is that when you have a baby in the house, time is precious. The Pump-In-Style is much faster than the pump I had, and it can do both sides at once, which is another time savings. I think it may be more efficient about getting milk out. And I think you can use it again without having to wash the entire pump -- which was a problem with the pump I had. Whatever you do, never buy a breast pump from a baby formula company. They have a reputation for making the most horribly uncomfortable breast pumps in the universe.

Also, you may not need a pump at all. Nor bottles and nipples and all that stuff. For my second baby, I bought the fancy Pump-In-Style. I figured that I'd have very little free time for pumping, so I wanted a pump that worked fast. But then we got a massive case of thrush (a yeast infection of the nursing system). I kept waiting for the thrush to go away before I got out the pump. As I write this, I've been battling thrush for 10 months -- and I still have never gotten that pump out of its box. Instead, I tote my (very placid) baby along with me wherever I go, even to the occasional business meeting. That's worked out surprisingly well. (Now I'm saving the pump in case I someday have a baby #3.)

One of my e-mail friends says that if anybody gives you samples of baby formula, throw them away. When breastfeeding gets rough, it’s nice not to have these in the house tempting you.

Don’t buy too many bottles and nipples of one brand until you are sure your baby likes them. Individual babies seem to have strong preferences. One sibling will only take Avent brand nipples, and another sibling from the same family will only take some other brand.

Feeding Solids

The current recommendation is to wait until the baby is six months old before starting solids. If you have a family history of allergies, it’s more important to read up on this and start solids later, so that you don’t trigger a food allergy in your baby. If you don’t have much of a family history of food allergies, then it’s OK to dive into more foods with less reading.

Don’t take feeding advice from baby food companies! They have other goals than giving you unbiased advice.

I’ve read lots of books about feeding babies. Each one makes lots of sense, has good information, and completely contradicts all the others. They also all make it sound like if you don’t do it their way you will somehow damage your baby. I think the thing to do is relax! There are lots of different ways to start solids, you’re not going to damage the baby by choosing the "wrong" one, and no matter what you do, your baby will get there sooner or later. No problem!

The classic top-of-the-line high chair to get is the Peg Perego Prima Pappa. I don’t recommend it. One of my e-mail friends had a baby who used to escape from hers regularly and a couple of times went nose-diving onto the floor. Yoiks! I did a lot of reading about highchair features before we bought ours, and I discovered that most the features on the expensive high chairs are things that you really don’t need unless you are pouring food into an infant who is probably way too young to need solids. We ended up choosing the very cheap $27 Graco high chair which works great for us. One feature it has that the top of the line high chairs don’t have is that it has a solid plastic bar that goes across the front of the chair, so that even if the seat belt comes open the baby is still well restrained. The bar and the seat and the seatback are all molded out of one piece of plastic -- it is a very nice design. I like being able to take away the high chair tray to wash it while the baby is still sitting in his high chair, without having the baby held in by just the one strap. The bar is what makes the difference.

My grandmother bought a travel high chair, a The First Years 3-in-1 booster seat. These seem to be available in lots of stores for about $18. We liked the one at Grandma’s so much that we got one of our own. That's turned out to be one of our favorite pieces of baby equipment. It is cool because you can put all its parts in the dishwasher -- although to tell you the truth we have never tried doing that. It is also cool because it means you can set up to feed the baby anywhere, in your own clean, safe spot. Some restaurant high chairs are sticky or dirty or missing straps, and some restaurants don’t even have high chairs. So it’s nice to have the option of bringing your own. Not that you’ll need a high chair anytime soon! But it’s nice to know that this thing exists for one day when you may need it.

Noses

One of the seamier tasks of parenting is clearing out your kid’s nose. The tools to use for this are a bottle of saline drops (ask at the drugstore for what to get) and a suction bulb. Sometimes you can get away with just using the suction bulb; sometimes you need the drops too. We needed to do this a lot for our first baby, but not at all for the second one. So maybe you'll get lucky and not have to deal with this.

Some tips: We ended up with two suction bulbs. One has a more pointy end. Our midwives told us to get it, for suctioning mucus from the baby's nose and mouth at birth. I think most hospitals will send you home with this same type of bulb when you give birth there. The other one has a more rounded tip and a clear plastic section so you can tell if you "caught" anything or not. The rounded tip seems much more gentle on the baby. I think its brand name is "The First Years". The saline solution will probably come in a bottle with a dropper tip. I found it was really hard to have any idea how much liquid I had put into the baby’s nose with this. What worked much better was to drip the saline solution onto my finger and then drip it from my finger into the baby's nose. Then I had a much better idea of how much had gone where. Babies noses normally sound "snurgly" for a month or two at 2-3 months of age. This doesn’t mean your kid is sick or has a cold or anything -- it is part of normal nose development. Just because your baby sounds snurgly doesn’t mean that you have to clean out its nose. My baby so hated having his nose cleaned out that I took to only trying to do anything about it if it interfered with his nursing or his breathing. If there’s gunk in a baby’s nose and it isn’t causing the baby any problems, it’s best to leave it there. Believe it or not, if you ignore a booger, it will work its way out automatically all by itself! Okay, maybe that's too much information. :)

You wanted to hear all that, right?

Miscellany

Some items we really like are:

• our baby backpack. You won’t need one until the baby is 4-6 months old, though. For a long time we used a baby backpack instead of a stroller, because then you can go where you want to without having to maneuver a stroller around.
• our diaper bag -- an ordinary denim shoulder bag with a zillion compartments -- a shower gift from a friend. Another option: Some people swear by the diaper bags or diaper backpacks from Land’s End.
• A sturdy hooded baby sweatshirt. Each of our babies has had one of these that got worn all the time. (By the way, beware strings on baby clothes, a strangulation hazard. Both of our favorite baby sweatshirts have elastic in the hood instead of drawstrings. This works great. If you do buy clothes with drawstrings, you can often pull the drawstring out or cut it off.)
• A friend's baby adored his bouncy seat. By 9 weeks of age, he could kick his legs enough to make himself bounce in the seat, which was pretty amazing to watch. On the other hand, my own babies never were interested in bouncing themselves But the seat was still a nice place to be able to put the baby down, so I am not sorry that we had one. If I had it to do over again, I’d buy one with a motor to make it vibrate. That can keep the baby entertained for longer.
• I can’t say we really like it, but... it is good to have some baby ibuprofen on hand. Our brand of choice is dye-free Motrin. Make sure you get the kind for infants (has an eyedropper or syringe) not for children (has a little cup), because the kids’ dosage is large. I like ibuprofen much better than acetaminophen (Tylenol) because ibuprofen lasts longer (6 hours compared to 4), is less toxic (the toxic dose of Tylenol is only about 3 times the regular dose!), and ibuprofen reduces swelling, while Tylenol doesn’t -- and part of the problem with teething is swelling, so ibuprofen works much better there. I think Motrin or berry-flavored Advil taste better than the grape flavored Advil.
• Before the baby reaches 6 months, you're supposed to use Tylenol rather than ibuprofen. It's good to have some baby Tylenol on hand, too, since you may not want to run out to the store at the moment when you find you need it.
• It’s a good idea to collect some basic baby medicines before the baby is born, so that you don’t have to go out at 3 in the morning to find a drugstore that carries what you want. I suggest having the following items: a baby teething gel (either Baby Orajel or Zilactin), baby Tylenol, baby Motrin, simethicone drops for colic (I've never needed them, but they work wonders for some babies), and a rectal thermometer (look for the cool new bendable ones).
• Clipping baby fingernails isn’t as scary as it initially sounds. I had thought I’d use baby nail clippers, but I’ve ended up using a very small pair of scissors. For a small baby, it’s easiest to clip nails while the baby sleeps. With a bigger baby, you can also sit in front of the TV or find a person to act distracting while you clip the baby's nails.
• A friend gave us a diaper wipes case and a little bottle of hand sanitizer to keep in the diaper bag. These have both come in handy again and again. I've become a big fan of hand sanitizer -- you can use it to de-germ your hands after changing a diaper blowout when you're out and about.
• I found disposable diaper changing pads at the store. It’s really nice to have a handful of these in the diaper bag. I like these better than the non-disposable kind, because if the non-disposable kind gets dirty, either from your baby or from doing a change on a dirty changing-station, then you have to take home this toxic thing and clean it. If you carry disposable changing pads with you, then you can always have a fresh, clean, diapering surface along with you, even if you have to do several changes when you're out. Note that a friend says she disagrees with me on this. She strongly prefers to have the thick quilted surface of a non-disposable changing pad, to keep her baby comfortable. My answer is that I've sometimes used a clean spare diaper as a pillow for the baby, which works great.
• A mobile to go above the baby’s diaper changing area might be nice. It’s a good place to put something that is interesting to look at. A lot of babies seem to be especially fond of whatever is over their diaper changing area. For my first baby, he was wildly fond of a piece of blank ceiling. He always seemed really glad to see it. We never did figure that out.

We've worked our way through four baby monitors. (That’s the thing where you put a radio transmitter in the baby’s room and a receiver with you, so you can hear it when the baby wakes up.) The first two were re statickey and noisy, and the third one got noisy after a while. If I were shopping for a new one, I’d want to try it out to hear if it is quiet enough. Or maybe this isn’t a problem for you -- I’m a very light sleeper, and white noise bothers me. You only need one baby monitor; we ended up with so many of them by accident. I’m told that some of the quietest baby monitors you can find are "the blue and white one that you can get for $1.50 at a garage sale". So maybe they don’t make ‘em like they used to. We've also had good luck with "900 mHz" baby monitors, but those seem to work for some people and not for others.

By the way, it's a good idea to bring along your baby monitor when you travel, so that you can leave the baby in one room and go off to another room and still hear the baby.

Favorite Brands

I’m not usually a brand name shopper. However, for baby products I’ve noticed some very consistent differences in quality between brands.

I’ve consistently been impressed by the quality of items made by these companies:

• Baby Gap - excellent, sturdy, long-lasting, comfortable clothes
• The First Years
• Little Tikes
• Combi
• Hanna Anderssen
• Gymboree -- especially their older clothing

And I’ve been consistently unimpressed by the quality of items made by these companies:

• Evenflo - they make practically everything; I have the impression of an uncaring corporate conglomerate that has something else on its mind than making safe products for children
• Safety 1st -- despite its nice name, everything of theirs that I’ve bought has been shoddy or has broken quickly. They have the nasty habit of cornering the market on certain items, too, so that you have no choice but to buy their products, even though you know that everything else you've bought from this company has broken fast.
• Cosco - such junk!

Finding Good Prices on Baby Gear

The number one cheapest place to find baby clothes and other gear is at garage sales. At a garage sale you can expect to pay 50 cents to a dollar per outfit. You can go home with an entire grocery bag of baby items for the price of a store-bought outfit or two. Also, I’ve been happier with the quality of items I find at garage sales or resale stores than the things I’ve found in regular stores. Go figure!

The second cheapest place to find baby clothes is at your local resale shops. You can find those in the phone book. Our local resale shops sell baby outfits for about $2 to $5 each.

The next cheapest place is the famous online auction site, eBay. For example, there was a time when I could not find footed pajamas for my toddler anywhere, maybe because they were out of season. Eventually I looked on eBay. I found someone selling perfect pajamas in exactly the right size for $3 for two pairs, plus $3.50 postage. So I ended up with hard-to-find out of season pajamas for about $3 per pair. Not bad!

Next is outlet stores and other discount stores. Expect to pay $10 to $20 per outfit.

Finally, at regular stores, expect to pay $15 to $30 per baby outfit. Ouch!

Here are Aunt Debbie’s Garage Sale Tips. Debbie writes:

I made several "rules" which has always made it successful for me:

1. I scan the papers only. I rarely go to sales that I see driving by. I check for things in the paper such as "quality baby clothes" or "kids clothes" and even things like "Gap, Oshkosh, etc. children's clothing." If there are clothes, there are usually other baby things and toys, but not always vice versa.
2. I only go to three sales, maybe four, maybe just one. Otherwise, I'll burn myself out.
3. I go right at the time they open. For good quality clothes, it is equivalent of one of those ads on TV that show people crowding around the door waiting for it to be unlocked and then they all run in.
4. I go to certain areas only. I NEVER go in my own neighborhood! The best success I've had are in the west side/Eberwhite areas as well as the Dickens, PI HI areas. Go to "rich people houses" where they are likely to have lots of good quality clothes for their kids and their kids hardly have a chance to wear them all. If you go into my neighborhood, you're likely to get KMart stuff with holes in them.
5. Buy ahead. I have several "Gap" clothes for my daughter to wear just about now or next year that I bought two or three years ago. I store them in boxes by sizes. Unfortunately, I'm having a tough time finding boys clothes at this age....I think boys are just dressed in blue jeans and t-shirts and put holes thru them while girls seem to have a larger wardrobe in general. Don't worry too much about growth and seasons. You can always give them away...especially since you know you only paid 50c. for it.

Strollers

We have four strollers! They’re all somewhat awful. Some things to look for in a stroller are:

• Try it out and see if it steers OK. I’ve seen lots where the wheels splay out and won’t roll forward. Put a baby-sized item in the stroller when you test this. Toys "R" Us, or, better yet, Babies "R" Us are stores with large stroller displays where you can try them out.
• A storage basket (for diaper bag, etc) is a necessity. My favorites of our strollers have a basket underneath the seat. I use it all the time.
• Two of ours have sunshades that can be tilted down to keep sun or rain off the baby.
• It's nice to have a seatback that reclines for naps.
• Try folding and unfolding the stroller to see how easy it is.
• I do know one person who adores her stroller. She has a Combi Ultra Savvy stroller. It reclines, is easy to use, has a basket, and has a seat belt that looks especially sensibly designed.
• You might want a food tray for the baby or a cup holder for you.
• When we were shopping for stroller #4 for baby #2, I narrowed down my stroller choices to two favorites to decide between, a Graco and a Combi. Then I went reading on epinions to choose which to buy. (I love epinions.com!) Reviews from the people who had just bought each stroller were glowing. However, people who had had the Graco for a while said that major dangerous things eventually happened to their strollers and that the company was not at all helpful. People who had had the Combi for a really long time talked about contacting the company to ask how to buy a replacement for a part that had minor cosmetic damage after years of wear, and the Combi company would instead replace the entire stroller, for free. I was impressed and bought a Combi!
• One of our strollers lets you snap in an infant car seat and wheel that around. I adore that feature!

Things you don’t need

We never needed a baby bathtub. It seems much easier to just take a bath together with the baby. We usually make this a two-parented affair: I bathe with the baby, then hand the baby out to Daddy, who dries the baby and dresses him while I finish my own bath. But one parent can bathe with a baby OK. Just put down a towel on the floor next to the tub before you go in. Then bathe with the baby. When you’re done washing the baby, hand the baby out to the towel, do a bit of drying, and then finish your own bath.

We never used our diaper table for diapering. We did use it to store some clothes and spare diapers. But we were much happier doing diaper changes on a bed or the floor, so the baby can't roll off.

Our crib. But we are weird.

Baby food!

Ok, I'll stop here! This is probably more info than you ever actually needed.

If you have questions, thoughts, things to add, things you disagree with, things that are outdated, please let me know

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