I got most of my items for my l’il bub before he was born, knowing the days after he was born I wouldn’t want to be traveling and getting items. I spent hours and hours of my time, purusing pinterest and other sites for ideas on what to have on my natural baby registry. Overall, I think I did pretty well. There were quite a few mainstream baby items that I consciously decided I didn’t need for one reason or another (many of these items causing some bickering between myself and my mom…). After being home from the hospital with an actual human being for a few months, there’s some items I’ve changed my mind on.
Here’s my list of 5 things I didn’t think I’d use, but did.
- Baby Monitor – Right from the start I planned on cosleeping with our little man during the night so I never registered or looked into any baby monitors. Why would I need one when he would be next to me the entire time? Something I failed to take into account was that babies sleep about 12 hours a night, while I sleep about 7, and I didn’t necessarily want to spend all of my time watching him sleep. Luckily someone had the forethought to get us a baby monitor anyways. I use it almost every night now. I get my son to bed around 7:30PM every night, and then I head downstairs for some much needed chores and me time. I can plop the monitor on the table and do whatever I need without worrying that I can’t see or hear him. I find this particularly useful since we have a two story townhome; I might not use this as much if we had a one story home.
- Changing Pad – This was something I had heard many people talk about as useless. When baby needs to be changed, baby is changed anywhere and everywhere. So I just assumed we would change him on our bed, on the floor… just wherever he was. My husband brought this home on one of his Babies R Us runs on our first day home. I absolutely love it. It’s great having a place to change baby that is up off the ground and doesn’t hurt my back. At the rate he’s going, he’ll outgrow this soon and we will be stuck changing him wherever anyways, but it’s been great while it’s lasted.
- Formula – I gave away every sample package of formula that I received. I had committed myself to exclusively breastfeeding, and I was worried having formula in the house, even as a ‘just in case’ would undermine my efforts. When you have a fussy baby, it’s easy to give them a bottle and assume that the problem was low supply, even when it actually wasn’t. Of course, I didn’t think I’d have problems with nursing – I read books and attended La Leche League meetings! So, it was pretty devastating when we were instructed to supplement our son (read about our nursing journey here!). I really kicked myself for throwing out all those samples since now we really needed then.
- Stroller – This is probably the one item my mom and I bickered about the most. I planned on wearing or carrying him anywhere we were going, and my mom argued with me about him getting too heavy. I find Babywearing much more convienent, but we did get a jogging stroller so I could take him out to exercise with me.
- Blankets – Baby safety dictates nothing on or around baby as they sleep – no stuffed animals, pillows or blankets. Instead we invested in quite a few sleep sacks. I got quite a few blankets at my baby shower and thought I would never use them. I forgot about all the times a sleep sack wouldn’t be appropriate – laid out on the floor, nursing cover, quick reach spit up cloth,car seat warmth… The list goes on! So for something I’d never use, these get used a lot!
What are some items you thought you’d never use?
