If you do go for disposable diapers: a lot of people swear by Diaper Genie, but I found it to be a pain in the butt. A simple diaper pail that uses regular garbage bags is better, IMHO.
Yes agreed. Also, Lansinoh also makes some really soft nursing pads now (much softer than the traditional type nursing pad). Once I found those, the tub of Lansinoh and those nursing pads finally allowed my nipples to heal. Only place I found them is Publix - they were a little harder to find.
I’m getting in here a little late, and most of what I would say has been covered. But I wanted to mention a couple of things. First, instead of a whole travel system-type stroller, I just got an infant car seat and a stroller frame like this. It’s cheaper overall, plus it’s much more lightweight than the regular travel-systems, and takes up less room in the trunk. When the baby outgrows the infant car seat at about 1 year old, you can switch to a lightweight umbrella stroller.
Also, I recommend getting a hand breast pump like Avent, and have it on hand before the baby is born…if you have any trouble getting the baby started on nursing, it’s very helpful to be able to pump a little so you don’t get engorged. For later when you start back to work, you may want an electric pump, but you won’t need to get that right away.
What if you don’t breastfeed? Do you need to sterilize then?
I’ve read that you really don’t. Modern water supplies and basic hygiene are sufficient for washing bottles and mixing formula. But, even if you’re really paranoid (like me), you don’t need any fancy sterilizing equipment. I used to just boil my bottles in a big pot of water on the stove.
Sorry, I was kind of addressing Lissla, who does appear to be planning to bf, and my comment was meant as “and if you’re still really paranoid about germs, keep this in mind.”
No, there is no reason to sterilize bottles for a normal, healthy baby, regardless of the breast/formula issue. (I almost wrote, “regardless of what you fill them with,” and then all sorts of horrible images arose in my mind - will never forget my friend’s tale of a baby with a bottle of Mt. Dew!)
We cloth diaper at home (am hoping to convince my daycare to do it, but still working on it), and honestly, have one of the lowest-end machines EVER - it handles 2 loads of diapers a week perfectly well. I honestly thought I’d be doing more laundry, but even if daycare allows us to CD, I’ll still be able to do 2 loads a week of diapers. I do a pre-rinse cycle, the regular wash cycle, and an additional cold rinse, but you don’t even have to do that - I know people who just do one regular wash cycle, and that works great for them. I don’t know what kind of diapers you’re thinking of using, but I use pocket diapers (with the inserts, so I wash a bunch of inserts, too), as well as a couple of fitted diapers (with covers) and all-in-one diapers. My cheap-o washer handles them fine.
(And Kalhoun, aside from the cost - which we’re looking at the big picture, as my son’s already in a larger diaper that’ll last probably until he’s potty-trained - my son has sensitive skin, and tends to rash up in disposables if he’s in them 24/7. So we do CDs at night during the week and all the time on the weekends, and disposables at daycare. His redness usually seems to come back when he’s in disposables, though.).
Slings are definitely easy to copy if you know how to sew. When the baby’s a little older, you might want to look into a mei-tai or a structured soft carrier, like a Beco or Ergo. I still carry my 25 lb 13 month old around in our mei-tai (on my hip, which he prefers) or in my Beco on my back. The mei-tai and SSCs are better for a baby’s spine than a Bjorn because they don’t hang the baby by their crotch. And it’s MUCH easier on Mom and Dad’s back.
Everyone here has given you great advice. One thing I wish I HAD NOT done was buy a breast pump - I actually ended up selling it to a friend as I had serious supply issues (luckily, a friend of mine bought it at a yard sale for me, so we didn’t pay a ton for it). I rented a hospital-grade breast pump from a local breastfeeding center, and used that instead - the regular Medela electric pump just didn’t cut it for me. If you’re not planning to pump and supplement with breastmilk in a bottle from the very beginning, I’d hold off on a pump. Because it might work the opposite way - you could have an abundant supply and be able to pump 4-5 oz in 10 minutes with a cheaper hand pump like a friend of mine.
Modern dishwashers usually have a sterilzing setting, so this is what I used. My mother was a little horrified, but I never have had a problem with either baby.
I never tried disposables except for travel, so I would have to ask the same question in reverse.* I can’t think of anything attractive about using disposables, really.
I had a diaper service for both kids, and the cost was about the same as for disposables, maybe a little less but not much. We travelled every year to visit Oma in the Netherlands, and I just signed up for a diaper service there for the summer.
- The first transatlantic trip I took my cloth diapers, but my carryon is not supposed to be heavier at the end of the trip, it’s supposed to be lighter. Immutable law of nature. So after that I brought disposables.
I just wanted to jump in with something I don’t think anyone has mentioned so far (can’t see it anyway). This may well be useful now as well, and saved my sanity several times in the early weeks: a gym ball. You know - one of those big inflatable things you do crunches over and is used in some forms of Pilates? I used mine to lie over when I was doing the whole ‘get the baby into position’ deal in the final weeks of pregnancy. Then when Niamh was born she was fairly colicky some nights. Sitting on the ball holding her fairly vertical meant that I could bounce her without my arms threatening to fall off, or my back to seize up. I had a vague idea that it was good for the pelvic floor muscles too, but I may have made that up.
She’s 10 months old now and I finally deflated the thing last weekend, but for a good couple of months it was a godsend.
Oh, and I wouldn’t buy a baby bath if I were you…
Yes, I recently read (in Parenting magazine or someplace similar…some magazine in my Dr.'s office) that if you have a “dry with heat” or some similar setting on your dishwasher that is as good as a separate sanitizer. Most bottles and pacifiers say to boil before first use, I did that and then used the dishwasher after that. You can get top rack baskets that are made to hold bottles and nipples for only a few bucks.
I will also recommend the Glamourmom nursing tops, at glamourmom.com. They are a little expensive but they have certain colors and styles that go on sale, plus if you order 2 or more you get 10% off. I love them because they let me feel a little cute, much better than some nursing bra monstrosities out there. Plus they helped cover my postbaby stretch marks. The tanks let me be able to lift a shirt and nurse without exposing my belly for all to see. They were even comfortable enough to sleep in, providing support for those owie nursing boobs and keeping breast pads in place. I am going to order a few more for my next baby too.
I watched my nephew ignore his roughly $500 of Christmas presents last year in order to play with the red bag they came in. I’m a firm proponent of the tupperware-and-cardboard-box school of kid’s toys. We have a photo of me at Christmas, age two. I’d been given a box of tissues. In the picture I am surrounded by tissues, and have a fiendishly happy expression.
Books we must have lots of, though. We also live about two minutes on foot from our local library, so I’m sure we’ll be there a lot.
I just ordered a washing machine, and it’s this one here, which doesn’t have a fantastic capacity for drying, although it’s a pretty highly-rated machine. We don’t have space for a stacked set, and we don’t have plumbing for an attached washer or venting for a dryer. I expect I’ll probably be doing laundry every day. Anything’s better than the laundromat. I’m not sure if it’ll be possible to keep up with the demand for clean diapers without having drying diapers everywhere. We might do half-and-half.
I was at The Bay and Wal-Mart today, and I was surprised to see neither seemed to carry cloth diapers at all. Where do you buy them?
We don’t have a dishwasher, but I’ve got some good big pots for boiling, and I thought hot soapy water would usually be okay.
I refuse to get a toy sterilizer. I didn’t even know they made them until today.
One thing I noticed about the strollers I was looking at- none of them had adjustable handles, and most were about comfortable for me. I’m only 5"3. My husband is 6"3. If he pushes one of those, he’ll be really uncomfortable. What do tall people do? Are adjustable-height strollers available?
The thing about sterilizing bottles is, some of them supposedly “leach” Og knows what. The clear plastic ones (Avent, for example) have been implicated.
Yeah. I wash all of our bottles (Dr. Brown’s) and sippies by hand now - just to be on the safe side. Not sure what we’ll do when it comes to a newborn and sterilizing - I’m thinking glass bottles.
Lissa, I’ve actually bought mostly Fuzzi Bunz cloth diapers and inserts, but I’ve bought gently used from a board I’m on, so I haven’t paid much for the tons of diapers I have. These are the kind that seem to work best for my active toddler, so we just stick with them (although I could easily see myself with a growing addiction to cute cloth diapers if I wasn’t careful). I’ll probably sell them again after baby #2 if I can manage to keep them in decent condition. I don’t know much about regular cloth diapers and covers, but it’s definitely cheap to do that.
And I’m pretty sure Maclaren makes stroller with adjustable handles, but those are a bit pricey.
And we have many, many books. My baby shower was actually a ‘book’ shower, too, and everyone brought their favorite children’s book, so he’s been pretty stocked for books (although that’s the one thing I keep buying - I’ll never turn him down if he asks me to buy him a book). He loves to ‘read’ now, and we’ve been reading to him since he was a newborn, so I’m hoping it pays off.
I have not read every single post in this thread, but here are some thoughts anyway.
Regarding cloth diapering, we mostly do it because I hate throwing away all of those disposables. I have seen arguments that the environmental impact of all of the washing/laundry soap actually pretty much evens out with the impact of all those disposables in the landfill, but somehow, on a visceral level, seeing a trash can full of diapers bothers me a lot more than running my washing machine 2 extra times per week.
We have cloth diapered in an apartment building using the World’s Crappiest Coin-Op Machine, so it can be done if you really want to.
As for baby slings, there are a lot of different varieties out there. With my first, I had a Maya Wrap ring-style sling. Nice for when the baby is a bit older and you can use the hip carry, but I didn’t really like it for the newborn stage. Too hard to keep the baby in there all snuggly. YMMV, of course. For my second, I got an Ella Roo wrap sling. The learning curve is a little steeper, but it goes over both shoulders, which really cuts down on the back strain, and holds the baby in much more securely. That’s the one I mostly use with Whatsit the Youngest (currently age 4 months).
We used our baby swing a lot in the first few months. It’s Fisher Price, and is rotatable so that you can swing them either side-to-side or back-to-front.
For the breast pump, I would invest the money and get one of the nice double-action electric pumps. I have a Medela Pump-in-Style and love it. They are more expensive, but IMHO totally worth the extra money.
Um, that’s all I got for now. Ask a thousand people what kind of baby gear they like, and you’ll get a thousand answers. 
Good…because I didn’t! I used those individual pouch bottles when he was really little.
The travel system we got was a nice height for both myself (6’1) and my Mom ( about 5’5). Some styles will have different heights, you basically have to go out and try to push the strollers around a little to see if they would work for both of you. My Mom and I did a lot of this before we bought one that was both comfortable, within our price range.
Almost universally though, IME, umbrella strollers are extremely short and the ‘handle extenders’ you can buy to make it more comfortable to push are 2-3 times the cost of the stroller (ten-fifteen bucks for the basic umbrella stroller, and 20-30 for the extenders… if you can find them). So we hardly ever used the umbrella (also because we don’t drive so the extra storage in the travel system was wonderful for shopping), and now he walks almost everywhere so I don’t bother taking any stroller at all unless I expect him to get tired (eg: going to the zoo for the day) and then I suck it up and live with the back ache.
Your best bet for most of the big ticket stuff is to go and take a look at it, and decide if it’ll work in your lifestyle. Can you see yourself using it? Does it do what you want it to? Is it comfortable for you to use? For example travel systems aren’t for everyone, it just worked really well for us… though honestly if I could’ve afforded it I LONGED for a Bugaboo, which looks like a wonderful stroller/travel system that combines the best things of an umbrella stroller while giving you storage space and versatility.
Oh yes. See if there is a hotline for new parents in your city, or similar numbers (we have a nursing hotline where you call them up, tell them your symptoms and they recommend either coming to the doctor or giving advice for minor things or just to calm you down). Baby books help, our district gives out new parent/new mother books with all sorts of info that was helpful in the middle of the night.
Also, keep in mind that you won’t need everything right away. For instance, you will eventually need a high chair (or booster seat or whatever), but you won’t need it for a few months. Unless you have a place to store it in the meantime, I’d recommend not asking for it yet. Sippy cups are the same, as are shoes and most toys and books. And those things are easy and cheap enough that you can buy them little by little as you need them, IMO.
Re: cloth/disposables: we’re going to cloth diaper, but haven’t started yet. Partially because we didn’t want to overwhelm ourselves as we got the hang of this parenthood thing, and partially because we didn’t want to have to buy a whole set of newborn size cloth diapers and then buy a whole set of small size a few weeks later. We figure that, whatever we decide to do, it’s not a permanent decision – using A for a while doesn’t mean we can’t use B, and vice-versa. FWIW, here’s a great blog post about the basics of cloth diapering.
Heh, mention of the Bugaboo brings to mind the most amusing and bizzare new field for conspicuous consumption: fantastically expensive baby strollers. 
Not saying you are doing that.
But I do have a lot of well to do friends, and the joke is who is going to show up first with a stroller that costs more than a second-hand car (‘It’s so light and convenient!’). 
I know, it’s crazy how much they are which is why I could never get one. Playing around with them though, I really wanted one.