You can and the hospital will probably provide one.
We liked Nuk pacifiers, though, and switched to those when we got home from the hospital. I guess studies show there is no advantage to the “orthodontic” ones, but the Nuks are lightweight and were easier for her to keep in her mouth when she was little.
I seem to remember that you should wait a week before using them to prevent confusion with the nipple if you are breast feeding. Once the little one is latching well, you should be good.
I think pretty much all brands are dishwasher safe these days, but our little one seems to prefer the Avent brand. Or we could just be falling into the selection bias fallacy. It seems fairly random if she will be in the mood for one or not.
We did get a neat little basket for the dishwasher that helps corral and orientate the pacifiers so that there is no standing water in them.
Babies grow out of everything pretty fast. Just get basic onesies for the early weeks - the baby will be barfing and pooping all over it anyway. 
Then have the ‘cute’ stuff for ‘show’. (We are all guilty of this.)
I think a swing is great. I loved mine and I got my brother his.
I bought a bassinet and it wasn’t that useful. Well, kinda. But not for long. My kid was huge. I ended up putting him in my bed. But bassinets aren’t that expensive - depends on how much you feel like spending.
And…What to Expect The First Year. And a 3 in one stoller is great. (The baby seat fits in the stroller but if you take it out it’s for toddlers and older kids.) Greco makes good ones. I mean, you can spend more money on a fancy one but I never felt the need. I was very lucky to have a stepmom spend $$$$ on us before my son was born. She doesn’t have any bio children. So as a result, he had EVERYTHING he needed and everything he didn’t.
And yeah…sleep. If you can, go to Costo for the things you can buy in advance for your house. Toilet paper, whatever. Or any store. Because the last thing you want to do when you’re running on steam is to realize you’re out of toilet paper or dish soap.
The hospital will probably require you to bring in the car-seat the day before releasing the baby. Ours also sent someone to our car to ensure it was correctly installed.
Has no one really said “a diaper pail of some kind”? Good LORD you need one, unless you’re going to take every diaper straight outside. It doesn’t have to be the fancy Diaper Genie II or whatever, a knock-off is fine, but you need something to keep your house from smelling like poo.
Along with the bottles and pacifiers, you need a way to sterilize/sanitize everything. They make countertop steam-sterilizers, but that’s overkill. Either a microwavable domed tray, or just the microwave bags (they look like Ziplock bags; you’ll find them near the bottles and such). Either one can steam-sterilize all the baby-feeding stuff easily.
At some point you’ll want a swing, also called the “Neglect-O-Matic”. I’d recommend one that you can plug in to the wall; otherwise, you’ll go nuts cranking, or go through tons of batteries.
When I brought home BabyDivine, the hospital checked to make sure we had a car seat but would not check it to make sure it was installed correctly. The nurse said that, if they said it was OK and then we were in an accident and the baby was hurt, the hospital would be liable because they OK’d it. :rolleyes:
Dr. B’s bottles are really good at controlling the amount of air that the baby swallows. Ours almost never burped and only spit up a handful of times. Now the bottles are a pain in the ass to clean, but I’d take that trade every time.
Ours actually offered to install it, but I had my neighbor the fireman do it for us (its a service provided by our fire departments).
ETA: of course they might have offered because of the scared shitless look on my face and they felt sorry for me.
**Carseat - **You are probably right about the hospital not letting you leave without confirming the baby is safely buckled into a carseat. I know that is the rule at our hospital. They also want you to have it installed (and preferably checked at a local safety center) so that you aren’t sitting there in the loading zone struggling to put it in, only to find out that the monster seat you bought doesn’t fit in the back of your econobox.
**Clothes - **In addition to onsies, we’ve had it recommended to get a couple separate tops/bottoms so that the cord stump isn’t always covered up.
**Bathtub - **From what I’ve read/heard it’s recommended to give washcloth baths until the cord stump falls off. Then you can use a little infant tub. So you might have a week or two before you need the tub, but it might be worth it to get it now so you don’t have to worry about it later.
**Weight - **I haven’t heard anything about the baby losing weight before birth. What I have heard is that it’s normal to lose a little after birth but it should regain after a couple weeks of normal feeding.
Our hospital offered a new baby class that was very helpful and also a tour of the birthing suites and postpartum rooms. The tour was nice because they covered stuff like where visitors can hang out/eat, what to do when you arrive, where to park, etc. And it was nice to have a dry run to the hospital.
Never had a sterilizer of any kind. However, we did have a nice covered basket that kept small stuff from rattling around in the dishwasher.
We skipped the pacifier all together.
We had a diaper genie, but I didn’t like it all that much. They are made of plastic and we found that it held onto the odor after a while, even though everything inside was bagged.
I’d go for a steel can if I had it to do over again.
Cotton balls: When a baby gets diarrhea, you’ll want to use these moistened with lukewarm water instead of diaper wipes. It’s much easier on the baby’s bottom.
I used waterproof squares (I think I got them at Babies R Us) to put under the baby’s bottom, in addition to diapers.
Books: You’ll be reading to the baby frequently, right? In addition to Goodnight, Moon and some Mother Goose rhymes, get some board books (I recommend Sandra Boynton’s work) and some more bedtime books (*Guess How Much I Love You) is really good, and there’s a ton of other good stuff out there. Also pick up a plastic book to distract the baby later when he or she is old enough to hold it and you need to change the baby. Do you have a library card? Librarians can be very helpful.
CD’s with very soothing music.
Yes you did:
No kids here but my brother and best friend had babies within 6 months of each other. I would second the advice to stock up all the things YOU normally use, if you have the space. As well as baby shampoo, diapers, and things the baby needs. Trips to the store can be… complicated, and you’ll be tired and not want to deal with that bs. If you can premake some healthy, convenient meals for the freezer, all the better.
Oh! And the little baby nail clippers. Babies will totally claw at their own face and injure themselves, if their nails are long enough. Who knew?
I wouldn’t bother with the formula. First of all, you’ll probably get scads of formula samples at the hospital and possibly even mailed to your house before your baby is born and immediately afterward.
Second, it’s a “just in case” item, which means there’s a high likelihood you won’t use it, which means it will take up annoying space in your house and then three months later you will wind up chucking it in the garbage like I did. Unless you live 50 miles from a grocery store, you can pretty easily get formula fairly quickly when you need it. I wouldn’t stock up.
Things you should get: Baby Tylenol and one of those nose suction things.
I never sterilized/sanitized anything either, for what that’s worth.
On the car seat: I’ve posted about this before, and realize it sounds completely stupid, but just make sure that you (or more likely, Mr. Neville) know(s) how the car seat bucket comes OUT, not just goes in. Presumably this wouldn’t be as much of a concern if you install the car seat yourselves, but if you have someone else do it…
On a couple of models, such as the one we had, the release mechanism- the one that detaches the bucket from the base- is not at all obvious. (On ours, it was two plastic bars on the back that you had to squeeze together- I don’t think I’ve ever seen any means of releasing a latch on anything that looked remotely like it.) The seat had been installed by a BIL with young kids a couple of months before our due date, when I wasn’t there to watch, so I’d never actually tried to do anything with it before it was time for checkout from the hospital and I went to bring the bucket up to put the new baby in. Between the passage of time since the installation and the swirl of sleeplessness, adrenaline, and physical discomfort that went along with the hospital stay, my wife’s memory of what to do was wildly inaccurate- she had me looking for a red button on the side near the front. Seriously, I struggled with it for, like, half an hour, and managed to detach the whole seat from the car without separating the bucket from the base. It seems so ridiculous now that we’ve had two kids’ worth of popping out the bucket, but when I’d never done it before and was going on two nights without sleep and knew that my wife and new baby were waiting for me to take them home and the clock was ticking until checkout time, it was a real ordeal. I could have spared myself the whole problem by learning this simple thing ahead of time.
I recommend having formula in the house even though it’s a “just in case” item because breastfeeding can go tits up for even the most well-intentioned person, and we don’t all live within 5 minutes of 24-hour grocery stores. Plus it’s just not where you want to go at 2am when you’re a hot sticky engorged mess and the baby has refused to nurse for 8 hours and is screaming its head off and your husband is frustrated and sullen and has to go to work in the morning (and nothing opens for several more hours so you literally CAN’T GET FORMULA FOR YOUR STARVING NEWBORN BABY).
Have some formula in the house. I feel strongly about that.
Here is where you go to garage sales (assuming that you have the energy now) or eBay or thrift shops. You will be popping them into the washer a lot, so there’s no real reason to pay top prices. And yeah, the discount stores do have them new for a fairly cheap price, if you don’t have the energy to hunt out used. There’s also hand-me-downs from friends and family, and Freecycle.
The hospital made a pacifier for my daughter out of a bottle nipple and cap by stuffing the nipple with cotton and taping it in. Lisa didn’t seem to have any nipple confusion at all. She sucked at the pacifier because she liked to suck, and she knew that I was the source of milk. And she didn’t like formula or breast milk (previously expressed) from a bottle, though when she was very hot, she liked to drink some cool water from a bottle.
It’s nice to have single serving meals in the freezer. If someone brings over a casserole, divide it up into portions and freeze. And that way, you can return the dish, if it’s not disposable.
Jeez, OK. It was just a piece of advice. This is why I try to stay out of baby advice threads. Lord.
We’re definitely planning to get our car seat professionally installed. We are two of the least mechanically inclined people on the planet. When everyone else was doing whatever it is kids do to learn mechanical skills, we were in our rooms reading books on astronomy.
Then how do you work your telescopes?
Your hospital (assuming, of course) probably has a list of places that will install it. I’ve been surprised at the amount of info we’ve gotten from ours.
As a counter point, I had an ultrasound scan 2 days before Junior was born and was assured that he was 9 pounds plus.
At birth he was actually 6 pounds 15 and lost 11 ounces in the hospital - even the Newborn clothing we had was quite huge on him and we had to get a couple of ‘Preemie’ sized outfits - by about 1 month of age he was into the newborn stuff, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt for you to have 1 or 2 small outfits in N ready - even I, Shopping Queen, was in no mood to go shopping when he was 3 days old.
Also, have a huge stack of onesies available - many breast fed babies will only poo once a week or every couple of weeks, but when they do it’s like a poo explosion - have loads of onesies available so you’re not constantly needing to wash. Ditto for burb cloths.
Also, pro-tip, put a receiving blanket across your lap when you’re nursing (at the beginning) - after nursing the little weasels can spit up like crazy before you even have a chance to get your boob put away resulting in soaked-in-mother’s-milk pants or skirt for you - the blanket can catch most of the mess. 