The following is a reprint of a previously published post. Enjoy!
There are countless ridiculous things that new parents are encouraged to buy for their precious new babies. I’ve already written about the insanity of expensive strollers, so this opinion should take no one by surprise.
I even took to my Twitter account and asked my followers for their two cents. Wipes warmer were hands down, (or butt down, in this case) the most popular unnecessary baby item. And here I need to confess that I actually asked for and then was given a wipes warmer for my second son. I quickly realized how useless this item was, not to mention how my wipes were constantly getting dried out. I quickly stopped using it.
Other unnecessary baby items were:
- Changing table. (I always just used a dresser with a pad on top)
- Diaper Genie.
- Individual plastic bags for each individual disposable diaper.
- Home fetal heart rate moniter.
The ridiculousness is never ending, as manufacturers continue to invent new and crazy must have items for parents to be. And it’s not just the cheap and plastic stuff that’s over the top, because the Waldorfy manufacturers are just as happy to sell you stuff, stuff, and more stuff. (As long as it’s wooden.)
Are there ridiculous baby items that arrived at your home from well meaning baby shower-ers? Please share your favorite least favorite items in the comments section below.
Katy Wolk-Stanley
{ 46 comments… read them below or add one }
I got a tiny pair of size 2 black converse-type shoes with flames on them. He only “wore” them once for a picture. He chewed on and played with them the rest of the time. What a waste of however much those cost.
we had several friends insist we ‘needed’ a pack n play ‘for naps’ – as in for use around our house on a regular basis. Isn’t that what the crib is for? We declined to get one – we decided our house wasn’t big enough to warrant having multiple places for the baby to sleep and if they weren’t crying loud enough for us to hear them in our tiny house, then they obviously didn’t need us that badly 😉
That is so funny- we didn’t bother with a crib for #1 since we had a pack and play. My in laws were horrified and showed up with a (very nice) crib for #2. I think she ended up sleeping in it twice and when she was old enough to climb out we just put the crib mattress on the floor. I still feel bad that they wasted their money but they own a furniture store so hopefully it was wholesale 🙂
When we were blessed with our first grandchild seventeen years ago, I was astonished and dismayed with all the gadgetry that came at the shower for her. Ugh! (And, yes, there was a wipes warmer…What???) I can only imagine what there is on the market now. Most needs are so basic and babies grow so fast and usually there is not much “passing down” of baby things anymore. This ole gal is just standing there with her mouth gaping in amazement!
I have to admit, the wipes warmer was one of our favorite items, BUT I have a excuse.
We cloth diapered and used cloth wipes. I would make a wipes solution and get all of the cloth wipes wet and squeeze them out and then lay each one folded in the wipe warmer. I could fit about 9 wipes. It was the best solution for our cloth diapering wipes dilemma. 🙂
I never used all the blankets everyone gave us or the plastic teething things. The pack and play was never used either. I’m sure I could think of much more.
this is going to sound crazy but the thing I could have done without was a crib. my son was in a cradle and then he was in a crib for a total of a month then in a toddler bed with side rails . Never had a problem with him crawling out or anything. Now my Diaper Gene I could not have lived without
this is going to sound crazy but the thing I could have done without was a crib. my son was in a cradle and then he was in a crib for a total of a month then in a toddler bed with side rails . Never had a problem with him crawling out or anything. Now my Diaper Gene I could not have lived without
I did not use the plastic baby tub with the attached mesh hammock. We tried to use it two or three times but after that we just bathed the baby on a towel in a couple inches of water in the regular bath tub. The plastic tub was just cumbersome to fill and empty and find a safe place for in our small bathroom.
We got so many fancy baby clothes (goregously made, but so uncomfortable and also a real pain to get on and off the kid) which we never used. Also we were gifted a bunch of toys that made noise, as though the kids wouldn’t know how to interact with something that didn’t talk to them. I hated those things.
But I loved our diaper genie (very sensitive noses in our household) and my expensive (but purchased used) stroller. To each their own, I guess. 🙂
Even though I’ve never had children, I have a funny story I would like to share. Years ago some friends of ours came to stay with us with their 1 month old baby. On day while walking by my bathroom I noticed my husband holding onto a round plastic thing with a tip on it. Of course, I had no idea what this was and thought immediately it was some kind of sex toy. My husband meanwhile was thinking the exact same thing as he examined it. Of course, we asked our friends and it was an aspirator!! We had never heard of this before and my husband and I recoiled in horror when they told us what they did with it. We still laugh about this.
I have to say an aspirator is perhaps one of the things I never had for my son that I think is a good thing to have if your kid is stuffed up with snot up the wazoo.
I think clothing is the most ridiculously wasteful baby item…because every baby I know has WAY too much. I’ve been given bags full of unused hand me downs. I try to return new items when I can and asked for used items at my baby shower.
I do have an expensive stroller, Phil and Ted’s, and it has definitely been worth it for me. I purchased it second hand for $175 but would pay full price if I had to. It has allowed me to transport my four children (all under 5 years old) easily. One walks, two ride and one is in the ergo, and we can board trimet and explore Portland, free with my pass from work. It can be used on uneven paths, allowing us take little family hikes. It even fits in the trunk of a small sedan! Before this stroller I had a free to me sit and stand type stroller that was so difficult to maneuver that we rarely went out.
My biggest annoyance was that my out of town family sent lots of seasonal outfits. I don’t think my daughter wore ONE outfit out of 30 because she was in a different size for the season. She couldn’t wear the summer bloomers because she had grown out them by the time summer rolled around. Not only was purchasing the outfit a waste, but the money and time to ship it 3000 miles was a waste as well. Ugh. I did resell these items since they all had the tags, but only got a few bucks for them. (You can’t hear my bitterness, can you?)
Another thing I didn’t use was diaper cream. I was given about 3 different tubes at the baby shower but didn’t use one. I don’t know what to do with that stuff.
If the tubes of diaper cream are not opened and haven’t expired, you can donate them to you local women’s shelter.
I think diaper cream was one of the unnecessaries for us, too! We use cloth diapers and you can’t use most diaper creams with them or they start to delaminate. Now that we’re trying for baby #2, I’m just going to ask for one or two jars of coconut oil, since that’s what we use on the very rare occasion my son gets a diaper rash.
Exactly the same…we used cloth diapers and coconut oil.
As a mommy to a 15 mo old boy, we are in the throws of “babyland”. Probably the most ridiculous baby item we received as a gift was a pair of baby size 1 hiking boots. If your baby fits in those, they most certainly are NOT hiking and most likely not even walking yet! The other unused gifts we got were disposable diapers and wipes. We cloth diaper and use baby washrags for wipes, just get them wet with water before each changing, and so we don’t use either of those items, but I was able to pass them onto some friends who had a baby 3 mos before we did. (Try as I might to convince people just how easy and convenient cloth diapering is, no one listens. And people are surprisingly afraid of baby poop. Ha!)
Almost everything we have personally bought for our son has been thrifted or craigslist, including big ticket items like an indestructible jogging stroller, baby swing, crib/dresser set, cloth diapers (yes, we put used diapers on our son’s butt, no, I don’t think its gross), glass bottles for when I am at work and baby needs mama’s milk. In fact, I’m still sitting on a $50 BabyGap gift card we received before our son was born because I hate retail shopping so much!
Baby’s do not actually require very much “stuff” and it’s one of my pet peeves that society tries to make us feel like inadequate parents because we choose not to afford the bells and whistles and single-purpose items that fill the shelves of big box baby stores.
When we were having my son I specifically told EVERYONE we were going to cloth diaper, and no one bought us sposies! I did have to explain to everyone how far cloth has come, but quite a few people bought us cloth diapers as a baby shower gift, so I think it was worth it. For baby #2, I’m thinking of having a shirt made that outlines why we CD. It would be easier!
I also came home from my baby shower with my first child with a wipe warmer. I think I used it for a month and then I passed it on to my sister in law. My husband was laid off while I was expecting our second. I asked for diapers. I already kept all the clothes and crib from our first child. No one listened. I returned what I could(to buy diapers, baby shampoo ect) and the rest of it I sold on craigslist. There is very little a baby really needs. Companies try to sell us all the unneeded stuff by acting like your baby will suffer without it. Like a wipe warmer.
As a New York City mother, my strollers were my most valuable purchase. We used them so much, every day, that we eventually had to get the wheels replaced. Several times. I also liked the changing table that we bought at a garage sale for $6. It held everything we needed so we didn’t need a dresser for a long time. Perhaps we should eliminate baby showers.
2 Things I absolutely did not want and several others I thought were just not needed.
1. Peep Peep Tee Pees for boys…
2. Diaper Genie (the Garbage is so close) and why would I want to spend horrendous amounts on something to contain garbage.
Monitor…. our house is on one floor and very small so we could hear Jamie no matter what. We did love the baby swing but we were given it.
To me, what was silly was the amount of newborn clothes. It was too much and the babies end up wearing onesies most of the time. Also we had a big baby so the newborn stuff wasn’t helpful. My favorite gift was someone had taken a basket and filled it with drugstore cold and laundry items
Whenever I host baby showers we try to do a diaper and wipes raffle- anyone who brings those is entered into a price (usually a popular restaurant gift card). The tiny clothes are so cute but really not needed.
I loved my nice stroller and carseat (also my nice baby carrier). I go cheap on other things. It’s all preference but I try to minimize and Craigslist as I can. All the primary colored stuff gets really old and overwhelming in your house really quickly!
For the most part I totally agree. You don’t need half of what you get, but particularly the clothes! Big but, I couldn’t have lived without the diaperGenie. Definite necessity with my sensitive nose.
And now you can discount what I say because I’m one of those expensive stroller people. That got me out of the house & back to the living. The message: some things are really good if they provide you an avenue to happiness.
As someone who is hoping for grandbabies in the near future, I too am amazed at all the stuff out there for babies that didn’t exist when my children were born! My usual shower gifts are two things I loved when I had babies–hooded bath towels and very soft cotton knit crib sheets. And I applaud all of you young mothers who are going back to cloth diapering–it’s an investment up front, but saves you so much money in the long run.
I’m shocked by how many people couldn’t live without a diaper genie. I thought people that follow this website would be totally against that! It is a huge plastic canister that holds plastic bags that individually wraps each diaper. Each diaper will take HUNDREDS of years to decompose and moreso when wrapped tightly into little tight wads in plastic bags. It is totally against the non consumer living. Cloth diapering is way easier, cheaper, reusable, more economical and better on the earth.
Me too. Human waste is illegal in landfills here ( considered a bio hazard), so if you have to clean the disposable diaper, why not just bypass the whole expense and use cloth.
My diaper genie doesn’t individually wrap each diaper. It’s basically just a narrow plastic bag tube with a lid that closes tightly to avoid smells from escaping.
How about a bikini sized for a newborn baby girl? My daughter was given one when she became a mother — in the winter. While cute, it was totally useless. Like Katy, I also never used a changing table, didn’t own a diaper genie, and I didn’t use purchased wipes, much less a wipes warmer. I was a cloth diaperer, soft washcloth wiper type of girl. I had a cheap covered diaper pail and dumped a little borax in there to help control odor. I washed diapers every other day, and rinsed them well before putting them in the diaper pail in the first place. My house never smelled diaper-y. I received about 3-4 dozen hand-me-down cloth diapers when I was pregnant, which helped a lot on the initial setup cost.
Off topic a bit, but I’m always amused by people I know who insist on having a diaper genie to control odor, but who have a litter box in the house.
Generally cat-owners don’t put the litter box in a bedroom.
I was given a free Diaper Genie- not the type that twists each one individually. I have found it wonderful in our small house. Would I buy a new one? No. Am I using the same one again for our second baby? Yes!
Never asked for a diaper warmer, thought it was a waste of money!
the one thing that I thought was foolish and didnt’ ask for, but ended up buying used off ebay was a bottle warmer!
so much quicker to warm the bottle when baby is screaming that they are hungry in the middle of the night!!!
Never asked for a wipe warmer, thought it was a waste of money!
the one thing that I thought was foolish and didnt’ ask for, but ended up buying used off ebay was a bottle warmer!
so much quicker to warm the bottle when baby is screaming that they are hungry in the middle of the night!!!
We bought a plug-in bottle warmer, as I worked night shifts, and my husband could then keep chilled bottles of breast milk and easily heat them up in the middle of the night. I do remember that he spilled it once, and and I had to leave work and bring my milky self home in the middle of my shift. I was secretly happy to come home.
Katy
My mother bought a sterilizer for the baby. So when toys or pacifier (or whatever) got dirty, we could sterilize it instead of just washing it off. We refused this gift, as well as the round crib (“but it’s so beautiful” — and takes up the whole room, and requires special sheets!) and got by with regular water and a well developed immune system.
I can see this as a specialty item if your baby is born with special needs, but this was before the baby was born, and he was born healthy, thank God.
When our friends offered to throw us a shower, we headed off to Babies R’ Us and proceded to make the world’s smallest gift registry ever! I think it had a whopping 7 or 8 items on it (a few of which we removed after our friends offered us their hand me downs). My husband and I couldn’t believe the amount of things that companies try to sell to new parents. It’s pretty ridiculous! As an added bonus, we didn’t find out the gender of our baby until she was born, which meant we didn’t get a lot of clothes at the shower!
I recently attended a shower where the couple asked for and received a vibrating baby bath tub.
Among some of the most ridiculous things…
SHOES! They can’t walk! Why wear shoes?!
Receiving blankets. There are some, especially when they are newborn, that are truly useful – but there are some that are a small square, and you can’t wrap the baby in them! I never saw another use for them.
I agree with your list above…..EXCEPT for the fetal heart monitor. Although, we did not purchase one (which IMO are super cheap). We rented one from a company, and it was a hospital quality monitor. I would have never dreamed of something like that, but my 3rd baby was stillborn, and I went on to have 5 more babies after that…it really was a God-send for me. Otherwise I would have been at the hospital every other day to listen to the heartbeat! This way, I could do it at home, and return the monitor when the baby was born! Win-win! 🙂
The Robeez were great once they figured out how to pull off their socks and it was 40F outside. I didn’t think of them as shoes but as a sock recovery system. Once I had them we went from losing at least two pair a week to perhaps one sock a month.
Boogie wipes.
Seriously? We need special saline wipes for wiping noses?
Also pacifier wipes(!). Ridiculous, in my opinion.
I’ve heard pacifier wipes are helpful for cleaning breast pump parts at work. Otherwise, yes, agreed: use the sink.
My SIL has pacifier wipes, and yes, on the whole I agree they’re not useful…except when we were at a baseball game and my nephew dropped his pacifier a million times. (OK more like 3)
My older son (who looooved his pacifier) had a clippy cord thing that kept his pacifier from falling to the ground.
Katy
I liked those single use bags in the picture above. I get a palin holder and a couple of refill packs. I never used them much for diapers (only stinkie ones when we were visiting a household that didn’t have small children. My daughter is 3.5 now and we still have a roll and a half left. I mostly and still use them for wet/accident clothes. I keep the couple of rolls in the car in the “emergeny chang of clothes” bag. I hink that they got a seal of approval from me partially due to the fact that I’ve never had to buy them.
How about the newborn bathrobe? How long are they going to “wear” that?? And my friend registered for a vibrating bathtub. I mean, really?? Just before I saw that, I found a simple bathtub for free on craigslist. You know, the plastic kind that is all you really need.
I’ve never understood the diaper genie. Whenever I babysit and they have one I keep thinking I’m using it wrong…isn’t it just a trash can?
I attended a cousin’s shower and left totally sick hearted about all of the disposable, plastic crap she received. She and her friends are all newly married and in baby factory mode. The baby carriers were lined up like cars at walmart. All I could think about was, did these kids consider the responsibility of having/raising children or did they just think, I want it so I’ll get it. Like a child is something you pluck off of a shelf and bring home and then get to accessorize. I was pretty bummed.
The next shower I attended was a close friend’s. She was 10 years older, having her first child. It was her second marriage. This had been a thoughtful, deliberate choice. So many of the gifts were handmade or organic. I had been apprehensive to give the soft, plush vegetable toys I had sewn. At my cousin’s they would have been laughed at, but at my friend’s people bragged them up (I couldn’t believe it). It was such a pleasant, encouraging experience. I think it comes down to the personality of the mother and her values. Sometimes, I feel like the odd hippy out in left field other times I’m in a group where less is more. I’d like to think that folks are catching on to the non-consumer lifestyle but the corporate message is penetrating and pervasive. On a hopeful note, another friend’s 1st grader asked where the compost bin was at the school cafeteria. She’s 6 and assumed that everyone composts. I hope it made the adults think (:
Diaper Genies, wipe warmers, pacifier wipesm special bath tubs…. seriously? With four kids, we used strictly cloth diapers and wet washcloths (with disposables and wipes used for the last two ONLY for long car trips), breastfed all of them, washed them in the sink, rinsed off anything that got dirty, dressed them in hand-me-downs, and saved a LOT of money and space. For the new young moms I’ve attended showers for, I take either children’s books (I used to be the school librarian for several of them, so they’re always thrilled) or offer to make a personalized mother’s bracelet after the baby arrives, including the child’s initials and Swaravski crystals in birthstone colors, since I’m also a jewelry maker. (I even made a necklace recently for a grandmother of five, with space to add more crystals as more kids arrive…)