When I finally became pregnant, I wanted to shoot myself in the face. You want the best for yourself and your baby, so you want to read every review about every item you need. Online reviews are a blessing and a curse. When you're researching baby stuff, it's mostly a curse. You spend days, weeks, reading through reviews until your eyeballs start bleeding. Target and Babies R Us have "helpful guides" to aid you in picking out all your baby stuff (it'll only be $5,000, but you can open up a store credit card to save you even more money!). Each guide has about 200 different baby items your baby will shrivel up and die if it doesn't get, and each item has 50 reviews, so you do the math (for you fellow English majors, that's 10,000). So you want to stop reading, but you can't because baby items are so expensive and you don't want to waste your money buying bad products. So you keep on, finish your registry, have your baby shower, and feel great about all that time you spent reading reviews when all you get is baby clothes (no offense to everyone who gave me baby clothes, because between my two showers I got everything I needed from my registry, plus I hardly had to buy clothes for a year).
But I digress. I think what I meant to say in the last paragraph was that 1. your baby doesn't need that much stuff, 2. you baby doesn't know or care if it has a bedroom furniture set that costs as much as a car, and 3. buy used whenever possible.
Case in point: Christmas. I told some girlfriends I only spent $25 on J and everyone gasped at my apparent child abuse. Guess what? I'm doing it again for his birthday. I found $240 worth of toys on Craigslist for $25. And I'm making him a playhouse out of one of our moving boxes. I know the retail industry says we must spend hundreds of dollars every birthday and Christmas to buy tons of presents for our children, but I would rather pay off my house fifteen years early than blow all my money on toys that are going to end up in a landfill.
Here is J's cheap (I prefer "Montessori") room:
Yes, that is a mattress on a floor. J doesn't need a crib. His room is baby proofed, so when he wakes up he can crawl off and play with his toys.
J loves to people watch.
Bookshelf? We don't use one. We stack his books in a corner. Babies will just throw all the books on the floor anyways.
Expensive toy box? Nope. I used a container that I already had. He also loves to bang on my old keyboard.
Changing table? Dresser? Expensive super-deluxe-ultra trashcan that reduces diaper stink? No, no, and no. You can save about $200 from not buying a table, a pad, and at least two covers. (Also, if you change your baby on the floor, there is no possibility of them falling off and injuring themselves.) You can use a nice, thick towel that you already have. I bought two $13 Sterilite storage units, one for diapers and one for a dresser. If J has more clothes than will fit in the three drawers, it's too many and he won't wear them all, so it's a good guide for me. Another hint about diaper stink- you're supposed to put your babies' poop in the toilet, even if you use disposables. It doesn't stink if you do that. So go buy a $5 trashcan and don't buy into the advertising that tells you that your house will explode in diaper fumes if you don't buy their $100 trashcan.
More toys on the opposite wall.
So if the start-up cost is holding you back, know that babies can be more affordable than you think. Just don't buy into the advertising. Start with the basics- several footie pajamas and one or two sleepsacks (you can buy used if you don't get enough at a shower), a car seat, somewhere for the baby to sleep, diapers, and wipes. Just remember that babies have lived from the beginning of humanity through the 1940s without Babies R Us.
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