Your due date is fast approaching and you are desperately trying to get everything ready for the imminent arrival of you new baby. You are well aware that once your bundle of joy arrives, between sleepless nights and seemingly continuous feeds, it will be difficult to get anything organised. As a result you are attempting to get it all done before baby arrives, but in your panic to be prepared it is easy to buy everything, just incase! The "essential" list gets longer and longer, to the point where everything becomes an essential.
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But all these things you are purchasing for the newest member of your family will not only take up a lot of much needed space in your home, which you are about to need every spare corner of with a new person living there. But it will also tug on your purse strings, draining your bank account of much needed funds for nappies, which you never seem to have enough of.
Consumer watchdog Which? compiled a list of the top 10 most useless baby products that new parents are wasting £100's on, with a door baby bouncer being named as the most pointless. Among the other nine are a top and tail bowl, manual breast pump, cot mobile, bumbo floor seat with tray, nappy stacker, swaddling blanket, baby reins, nappy disposal bin and a fabric sling or baby carrier.
To make sure you have as much room as possible to welcome a new little person to your home, here are a few other things you may be tempted with but need to put down, before you find yourself at the till with shopping bags full of things your baby really doesn't need:
Shoes: Those miniature Nike trainers and converse you were eyeing up long before you were even pregnant are incredibly cute but at the same time completely unnecessary. Sure, you will have the coolest baby going, but not for very long with the speed their feet grow. Your child won't need any shoes until they are walking, so save your pennies and stick to socks to keep tiny tootsies warm.
Clothes: Of course your baby needs clothes, but do they really need a wardrobe four times the size of yours when they are only one week old? As lovely as little outfits look, they will only get covered in baby sick and be too small before you know it.
Stuffed Toys: It is easy to keep buying toys for your little one, which they are also likely to receive in abundance from doting friends and relatives. Actually babies show little interest in stuffed animals until they are at least six months old.
But, if all these things are just going to fill a room with unopened boxes, when you are trying to make space, how do you know which "essentials" are actually essential and how do you make room for them all?
Tagged in Pregnancy