What You Need

WHAT YOU NEED: Stuff [from Chapter 3: The Third Trimester]

“We are grabbing every parenting product we can get our hands on. Sometimes it feels like we’re preparing for a hurricane rather than a baby.” –– Jeff H., Brooklyn, NY

    Back in the olden days, when you were about to have a baby, you’d need maybe a couple of bottles, something to mash peas with, a pile of swaddling, and you were good to go. Today, they won’t even allow you to take the baby home from the hospital unless you can show proof that you’ve accumulated at least one metric ton of choking-hazard-free merchandise. Stuff (and I use that term in the George Carlin sense) is a major part of modern parenting.

    Registering –– or worse yet, doing your own shopping –– for baby products can be almost as overwhelming to expectant fathers as the prospect of the birth itself. The baby goods industry has never offered a more voluminous array of options, and the whirlwind of bottle warmers, teething rings, and tummy-time mats can be quite disorienting. You shouldn’t let your drive to provide your baby with the safest, most developmentally enriching products on the market bankrupt you before you get a chance to open your child’s 527 college savings account. Unfortunately, since the flooding of your home with unnecessary kid stuff is virtually inevitable, here are some thoughts on a few of the most important new-parent acquisitions.

• Someplace for the Baby to Sleep: Cribs, bassinets, cradles, Moses baskets –– I’ve known people who’ve crowded their homes with several or even all of these items, assuming they each serve a different purpose. They don’t. The latter three all distinguish themselves from the crib by providing a smaller sleeping area, which purportedly makes them a more familiar-feeling nest for a newborn who has just spent nine months confined to a very tiny space. Amongst themselves, though, this trio just represent different gradations of the same product. They can be compared to the holy trinity of Mars candy bars: 3 Musketeers contains plain nougat; add caramel and you’ve got Milky Way; when peanuts enter the picture, it’s Snickers. Same with the bedding: A Moses basket is a soft little repository in which a baby can sleep; make it rock and it’s a cradle; add legs or a stand of some kind and you have a bassinet.

    So it really all comes down to a question of “Big sleeping thing or little sleeping thing?” Since your child will eventually grow out of the more diminutive slumber unit, a crib will probably be a necessity at some point. Therefore, if your kid can handle it, you can save time, space, and money by bypassing the smaller baby beds completely. But what of the comfort infants are supposed to derive from an enclosed sleeping area? Well, it depends on the child –– just like adults, babies often refuse to conform to generalizations. My wife and I got a bassinet and a crib, assuming we would use the lesser unit until Bryn was ready to transition to the full-size one; turned out, Bryn really liked to sprawl out in bed and being confined within a tight space was, for her, about as conducive to slumber as the sweet lullaby of a jackhammer. After three ill-fated attempts at using the bassinet for its intended purpose, it was demoted to the role of rocking laundry hamper.

• Something to Change the Baby On: Anybody who purchases a separate dresser and changing table for their child’s room obviously has too much free space in his home and must be looking to fill in the excess square footage.

• Something for the Baby to Wear: Infants grow very fast. This is a fact that escapes most purchasers of children’s clothing. Any butterfly-patterned jumper or fuzzy coveralls, no matter how adorable, should be expected to have a shelf life of a few months max. Most parents are presented with more newborn clothing than they can fit into the drawers of their pastel nursery dresser, and then find that they need to purchase an entirely new wardrobe when the child hits three months and is bursting through his footie pajamas like Hulk Hogan through a tear-away muscle shirt.
    Some dads avoid the feast-famine clothing cycle by assigning certain trustworthy folks to older-age apparel duty. Having a few 3-to-6-, 6-to-9-, or even 9-to-12-month outfits stuffed away in a closet for future use will be immensely helpful. Just be sure to instruct these select few people to keep the correct time of year in mind when they make their clothing selections. If your child is born in July, shorts and swimsuits sized for a 6-month-old will be as useless as the newborn-sized snowsuit someone is bound to give her. “People gave us so much clothing that was seasonally inappropriate,” said Stuart Z., a dad in Baltimore. “Anyone who was able to think ahead with their gifts rose so high in my esteem.”

• Someplace to Feed the Baby: When it comes to high chairs, safe and sturdy should do the trick. Unfortunately, that may cost you. Because it is frustratingly difficult to find safe, sturdy, and simple. Since it appears that every well-built high chair is loaded down with price-raising “bonus options,” you might feel forced into purchasing a higher-end model than you originally had in mind.

    Since the ones with casters tend to be slightly pricier, my wife and I figured we’d save a bit by buying a seat that didn’t roll. They’re all pretty lightweight, so moving one around by hand wouldn’t have been a problem –– and with slightly uneven hardwood floors, we saw a potential downside to wheels. After much comparison shopping, though, we had a hard time finding a stationary high chair that seemed sturdier than your average Tinker Toy construction. So we paid for the casters and had to keep them locked.

    The most bewildering extra that high chair manufacturers will try to sell you on, though, is reclinability. Now, I have always been told that lying down while eating is not the best idea. So the option of letting my infant lean back while learning to take in solid food wasn’t exactly a big draw. Once again, though, the non-reclining seats appeared to have been built by the first little pig. Ours has three recline positions, none of which we’ve ever used.

    One last thing about high chairs: If yours comes with toys attached, make sure the playthings can be easily removed. Getting a toddler with a finicky palate to fulfill his minimum vegetable intake is a difficult enough activity as it is; distractions in the form of a squeaking lobster and bead-filled, spring-mounted rattle do not work in your favor.

• Someplace to Put the Baby: Sometimes you’ve just got to put the kid down. My earliest memories are of being in a playpen (although I’m not sure if they’re genuine recollections or images manufactured by my mind after seeing the old photos of my two-year-old self sitting in one, gnawing on the metal keys of a toy piano). The little mesh cages are still around and serve the purpose just as well as they used to, although they’re now called “playards.” Parents felt guilty putting their baby in a “pen,” but apparently they’re just fine with the concept if the same 3’ x 2’ enclosure is referred to as a “yard.”

    If you’re dealing with an infant who’s still in danger of rolling onto his face, though, the relatively open space afforded by a playard may be too much freedom. For the youngest children, the best solution is the bouncy chair –– an item which I and many of the dads I spoke to hold to be indispensable. I have yet to meet a baby who didn’t love to lounge in one, and most bouncy seats come equipped with an overhead toy bar capable of stimulating and entertaining your infant long enough for you to eat dinner or maybe even solve a jumble.

    When the kid is old enough to stand, you can switch to one of the larger contraptions designed for non-mobile play. They are called Activity Stations, Exersaucers, or Intellitainers, depending on who makes them, but they all essentially set your child up like the keyboardist of an ‘80s new wave band, putting him in a rotating seat so he can spin around and play with 360º of dinging, boinging, rattling fun.

    Of course, in the world of babies, there is no sure thing. You will hear, just as I did, that a baby swing is essential. We were given three. And while I know many infants who are lulled to sleep with every metronomic ride, Bryn refused to spend more than two or three minutes in one without screaming.

• Glider Rockers: As someone who’s still a safe distance from retirement age, you may not have spent much time in a rocking chair in the past decade or so. But, man, have they improved. These things are engineering marvels. They don’t just sway back and forth on curved pieces of wood, they slide effortlessly along a track in a smooth arc you must feel to believe. You owe it to yourself to try one out. Just walk into any baby goods superstore and you’ll see them all lined up waiting for you to take your ass for a test drive. Some even come with rocking ottomans. There is a danger, though: Glider rockers are pricey, especially the top-of-the-line Dutailiers. But they’re just so damn tempting. They’re the high-definition flat-screen TVs of nursery furniture.