Hindsight is 20/20

As I look around my house and the sea of baby toys, equipment and stuff in general, it brings me back to when I registered for all this during my pregnancy. And I ask, why??! Not that all of it was crazy to get, but there is just so much that I didn’t really need, or at least there were features I didn't need to pay more for. I use it all because it’s here, but my daughter, Kaylee, wouldn’t be any worse off without some of it.

I remember registering for the ‘necessary’ baby supplies with my friend, Nikki. Since I didn’t have any friends with children living near me at the time, Nikki came along to help – she works with children and so was deemed the expert on what to get. Nikki was SO helpful and provided great insights on feeding, toys, and travel items (like pack ‘n’ plays). Looking back it would have been nice to have a ‘practicing’ mom go with us too – Nikki for the ‘research’ school of thought and a mom for the ‘this is good in theory, but not in practice’ school of thought. It’s definitely a must to register for as much stuff as possible when you have a baby shower looming, but once that’s all said and done there’s no reason to be bullied into spending hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars on stuff you won’t even use right away, if at all.

For example I definitely could have waited to get a crib (Kaylee slept in her pack ‘n’ play next to my side of the bed for the first 3 months), bottles and bottle accessories, a breast pump, gates and other baby proofing items, and a high chair. In fact, waiting probably would have led me to more practical purchases because I would have had a better idea of what my day-to-day baby needs were. Like with the baby-proofing stuff, we ended up moving when Kaylee was 3 months old, so the gates I had bought for our old house ended up being a little different than the ones we would have purchased for the new house – although we made them work.

I was at least proud of myself for being wise enough not to register for baby clothes. I knew I was having a girl and I don’t know if the same phenomenon occurs if you are having a boy, but Oh.My.Gosh. the amount of baby clothes people got for Kaylee was unreal. There was definitely no need for me to purchase, or even register for, baby clothes. I was not operating under the illusion that even if I did register for clothes that anyone would actually buy what I thought was cute and steer away from what they thought was cute. Luckily there was no disagreement in baby-style.

My one mistake with clothing though was that, in true sMother fashion, I decided to open, de-tag, and wash all her clothes (to kill any lingering germs and soften abrasive fabrics, of course!) before she even entered the world. This was a new mom blunder because what they say is true: kids grow fast! In addition, I really didn’t have the energy, unless motivated by poop or spit-up, to change Kaylee out of her little outfits. Now that she is older, she goes through multiple costume changes, sometimes because she’s dirty and sometimes just for fun. But in those early, not-strong-enough-to-hold-her-own-head-up days, I had a less-is-more approach.

Welcome!

I am the proud mother of a beautiful little girl, Kaylee, who is barely over a year old now. I keep a separate blog of her development reserved for close friends and family, but wanted to begin another blog as an outlet for myself, and one that might prove helpful to fellow mothers/parents who may worry, like me, that their kids will grow up calling them 'smother' instead of mother.

As with many parents out there, I try my best to soak up information that can help me be the best parent to my child. This has led me on a journey of information gathering. I subscribe to multiple parenting websites, fellow parents' blogs, and have even gone 'oldschool' and subscribed to a magazine. All of which have been helpful, albeit slightly overwhelming. Many times, I get advice from one source only to discover that it is contradicted by another source... frustrating, to say the least.

As a result, I have concluded that the so-called 'experts' while incredibly well-educated and backed by (I hope) countless hours of research, are no expert on my daughter, Kaylee. I am the expert on my own child. So, while I have created this blog as a way to vent about the monumental number of opinions out there on raising children, if you're reading this to get advice, my humble opinion should really only be taken with a grain of salt. What has worked and is working for Kaylee, might not be the best for anyone else's child.

Ultimately, my hope for anyone reading this, is that this blog will provide some good-natured, anecdotal comedy, a little commiseration, and maybe some helpful hints along the way.