Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
I used to think that women loved to shop for baby clothes, and that it was a little odd that I didn't seem to have this trait myself. Then I noticed that men, also, loved to shop for baby clothes and, for that matter, so do a lot of children. Eventually, I, too got sucked in (Under the Nile does it for me).
But I had not yet succumbed prior to Teddy's birth. My husband and I took a gift certificate from our wedding to J.C. Penney and spent it on receiving blankets (somewhat useful; we got plenty hand-me-down), baby washcloths (completely useless; we prefer some cloth wipes we bought or regular washcloths), a hooded towel (ditto), a bunch of onesies (somewhat useful, but we did not yet have an eye for which were easy to put on), some socks (useful, but again, plenty hand-me-down and gifts) and an extremely adorable pair of booties which Roland was taken in by. A friend who spent time with us waiting for the birth, and was with me throughout the birth, said upon seeing the booties, "You know you'll lose one of those the first time you put them on the baby". I disclaimed responsibility for the acquisition. In the event, we still have them, and he wore them a bunch.
The baby hats never stayed on his head. The baby gowns, recommended by the same friend, were what we mostly used for the first month or so. Those, the snap up the front undershirts other new parents recommended, and the one fuzzy sleeper we received as a gift were far and away the most useful items of baby clothing we had.
Teddy moved up a size at about 2 and a half months. We still had a bunch of new clothes which were gifts from friends at the baby shower and shortly after the birth. We also got some more presents on our trip back East. Roland's sister supplied a box of hand-me-downs and a friend supplied several boxes.
After several months of this, we've developed some very strong opinions of what is useful and what isn't, and how you can acquire the good stuff.
The most typical sizing strategies are age and weight and/or height. So, for example, newborn means newborn to three months in age. Some tags and some stores use the beginning of the range for labelling a category; others use the end of the range, which makes it really confusing; the weight/height part of the tag can help clear things up. Just as no one actually has 2.5 children, it is the rare baby who moves into and out of a size right at the range. All-in-one items, like footed sleepers, are the most likely to stop fitting first, as a stocky baby might need more room around the middle long before filling out the length and a long baby might not fill out the middle for months or years.
Infant butts are pretty small. Disposable diapers are really trim. Cloth diapers come in a variety of configurations, but for the most part, they are bulkier than disposables and by definition bulkier than a bare butt, or a butt in underwear. Most baby clothes are designed for a diapered baby, but there's a wide variation, reflecting the wide variation in infants and wide variation in diapers. Whatever you are given, you are given. If you are shopping, it might be worth paying attention to butt-space, especially if you have a stocky baby wearing cloth diapers.
Gowns and undershirts only, maybe some socks, for the first few months. It's not like the kid is moving, and newborns are kinda scary to handle; trying to get them in and out of clothes can be terrifying to a new parent. If you buy onesies or sleepers, get ones that you can lay the baby on and then snap them into it, without having to get anything over their head or feet (the arms are unavoidable, unfortunately). Carefully inspect the snaps on onesies. They sometimes seem to go the full length, but then the crotch is sewn together. Annoying.
ave plenty of receiving blankets for swaddling, mopping up, and wedging into places to help support your baby (the swing, the car seat, etc.). In a pinch, a receiving blanket can be used for just about anything (swaddle without clothing and they are still warm; use as a burp cloth; use as an improvised diaper; used as a towel after the bath, etc.).
How many outfits you need will depend on how much your baby spits up and how predictably. A not very spitty baby doesn't need to be changed very often, as long as you catch poops before they get out of hand. Clothing intended for infant sleep has flame retardant treatment. This is not as good an idea as it might first appear. First of all, some laundering techniques (dryer sheets) can intefere with the effectiveness of the flame retardant coating. Second, and more important, the chemicals used are increasingly under suspicion of causing long term health problems. Never feel bad for letting your baby sleep in clothing marked not intended for infant sleep, unless that clothing has something the baby might choke on.
All that said, we love the terry cloth sleepers with the footies built in. They didn't get twisted around the want the infant gowns did, and they seemed to help Teddy sleep a little longer by keeping him warm and cozy. I'd leave Teddy in the sleeper during the day, too, and take him out for walks knowing the terry cloth kept him cozy and his feet would be nice and warm, too.
I'm writing this while Teddy is seven months and a week old. Once he started crawling, the sleepers were a bit of a problem, as they slowed him down a little. But when he started pulling up and cruising (shortly before seven months), they became a hazard. The feet would get pulled down and he'd trip on them. So we got used to putting him into a shirt and pants in the morning. We put him into a sleeper when we've decided he's falling down a little too often to be allowed to continue to pull himself up and cruise.
Crawling made Teddy's knees red, if he wore only a shirt and diaper, or a diaper and onesie. I tried to keep him in pants for some protection, but the crawling tended to stretch the legs which would then go below his feet and became a trip hazard when he was pulling up. Over time, the skin on his knees toughened up noticeably.
The clothing sized six months can be either six to nine months or six to twelve months, with obvious implications for the way it fits and how long it fits.
A lot of sleepers and creepers are made with zippers instead of snaps. These suck. You can't sneak a finger in to see if the diaper needs changing. If you are using disposables, that doesn't matter, as you tell primarily by the changing shape of the diaper as it absorbs pee.
Keeping a baby warm during the winter can be tricky. While in theory, baby carriers allow you to warm the baby with your own heat, if you are bundled up and the baby is on the outside, that doesn't work very well. Also, I think that some of the structured baby carriers (Snugli, Bjorn, etc.) may put pressure on the legs in a way that makes it hard for infant circulation to keep extremities warm. All-in-one fleece suits are made with little fold over sleeves to cover the hands, and these help. It helps a lot if the baby has long pants and sleeves and a hat on inside the snow suit, just as we layer before heading out to play in the snow.
We also brought blankets, and wrapped them around Teddy in the carrier. We wore bigger jackets ourselves, and tried to cover him up with those. If I have another baby small during winter, I'll probably buy an oversized coat and plan on buttoning it over him; I wish I'd done that for Teddy.
Strollers can do a lot to protect a baby from wind and rain (especially if you buy the covers that enclose them entirely). But a small umbrella (there are some truly tiny ones available these days) tucked into a back pocket, or a pocket in a baby carrier, kept me and Teddy dry and somewhat sheltered from the wind when the weather took a turn for the worse. One baby carrier has an integrated hood for the baby (the Kelty Kangaroo); that carrier, unfortunately, did not work well for us.
Paying full price for baby clothing is a lot more fun when it's someone else's baby, and I'm only buying one outfit. When a baby is going through a complete set of clothing every few months, used clothing makes a lot of sense. Friends and relatives who had children and do not intend to have more are good sources of boxes of clothing that their children no longer need. If you are willing to tolerate a certain amount of gender ambiguity (a good thing with babies), you can increase the number of people you can hit up for clothing.
Unfortunately, however, certain items tend to get used and used up quite rapidly, and, just as with used anything else, things that look good but don't work well tend to be immortal second-hand items. Used cloth diapering gear can be a lot more worn out than it appears to be, particularly the elastic around the legs in fitted diapers and fitted covers. Sleepers tend to take such a beating they don't make it past the second baby. The shirts which survive multiple kids tend to be the ones with the smallest hole for the baby's head, or some other annoying attribute. Don't trust the tags, either. Cotton baby clothes that have seen a lot of hot water washes may have shrunk themselves down a full size, especially all-in-ones like footed sleepers.
If the original owner of the baby gear was that size at a different time of year (say, the first baby wore it in the summer and your baby is that size during the winter), you may get very limited use out of the clothing.
Consignment stores for baby gear are relatively common. Some of the clothing I got free from friends was purchased by them at consignment stores. Consignment stores sell all kinds of things in addition to clothing; good stores check recall status on everything in the store and will also check condition of stuff they accept, which makes this safer than your sister's friend's coworker's hand-me-down baby gear.
We were quite pleased to discover that Costco carries some infant clothing. As with their adult clothing, the selection is limited, and unpredictable, but they usually had good sleepers, creepers and onesies, which were the things least represented in the used collection.
When I was a child, my father built a wall of wooden boxes and shelving to put them on. He even made the boxes (no dovetails; just nailed together -- this was in the garage after all, and while he appreciated dovetailing, I don't think he knew how to do it). Each box was numbered, and there was a clipboard hanging on a nail with a piece of paper that listed the contents of each box. My parents were orderly to a fault.
Seasonally, our clothes rotated. Winter clothes went into the boxes and summer clothes came out. When we outgrew something, it went into the boxes and we started wearing whatever we found in the boxes from the previous sibling.
While few parents with comparable resources would pinch pennies to quite the same degree, anyone planning a second or nth child is likely to think to pack up things that don't fit any more, probaby in a cardboard box, hopefully with a label of some sort, figuring this will save them the trouble of buying or otherwise acquiring everything a second time. If the labelling is clear enough, it might even be safe to include the boxes of things your baby does not yet fit (toys not yet appropriate, etc.) that you have received as gifts or hand-me-downs. You, too, may wind up with a wall or closet full of boxes with labels. I've certainly seen this at a lot of friends' houses, and I see it happening in our apartment already. It's also a natural location for pregnancy clothes and the various rounds of post-partum clothing.
This topic is a huge bummer. Breastfeeding may or may not help get pregnancy weight off. There might or might not be pregnancy weight to get off. Post-pregnancy shape is likely to be very different from pre-pregnancy, independent of what the scale says. And even if everything else co-operated, sometimes the breasts stay huge as long as mama breastfeeds.
I've been heavy; a lot of my more fashionable friends have been or are heavy. When they couldn't buy the beautiful clothing they wanted, they bought cool shoes and handbags instead. When my postpartum weight wouldn't budge and my shape was slow to return, I decided to follow suit. Specifically, I bought a capacious handbag that was nonetheless really fun. It'll hold a water bottle, sunglasses, minimal diaper kit, wallet, cell phone, PDA and a few other items. All at once. It's an Isabella Fiore and it's got red and blue dots all over it. It cheers me up almost every day. I also bought some really great sandals.
I think it's really easy to sublimate one's own desire for pretty clothing completely onto one's child. I would strongly encourage new mamas (and new papas) to try to find a way to get pretty things for themselves (and each other) as well.
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created March 29, 2006 Updated March 30, 2006