Womb to Bloom - Maternity & Beyond

Generous friends and family members - and at least one baby shower - probably provided you with lots of infant essentials before your baby was born. Great! You’ve got the crib, the swing, and the stroller - not to mention all the baby lotion you’ll ever need for this baby and your next three. But now comes the day-to-day (expensive) reality of the big three: food, clothes, and toys. During the first year of your baby’s life, you’ll spend plenty on these items, but with the advice below, you can save at least a few hundred dollars - which is good because diapers don’t buy themselves!

Food For Thought
You’ll soon discover that feeding your baby is a joy. A never-ending joy at first, but a joy nonetheless. Before long, however, watching all of those ounces of formula disappear into your baby and counting the jars of baby food that hit the trashcan will make you realize: feeding this child is expensive! But your pocketbook doesn’t have to take a huge hit.

Breast Feeding
The best, cheapest way to feed your baby is by breastfeeding. If you plan to be around your baby for every feeding until she’s a year old, you won’t have to invest one red cent in bottles, liners, formula, or breast pumps. If you plan to work outside the home and pump, you’ll need all of those things except formula; however, you’ll still save a lot of money over parents who formula-feed.

You may be tempted to spend as little as possible on a pump, but if you ask any pumping mother, she’ll tell you that you need a dual electric breast pump if you plan to pump even occasionally. The bad news is that these can cost more than $300. The good news is that if you scour yard sales or online auction sites (or just know someone who’s selling hers), you can purchase a high-quality second-hand pump for much less than retail price.

At first blush, you might say, “Ew! I don’t want to buy such a personal accessory second-hand!” For sanitation purposes, you’ll have to sterilize all of the pieces that came into contact with the original owner, and you’ll purchase your own membranes (those tubes that your breast milk flows through). With these two steps, it’ll be like having a new pump - at a fraction of the cost!

Formula
When it comes to formula, the single best way to save money is by using a store brand. For some reason, moms who won’t buy name brands of anything else will shell out up to 100 percent more for a commercial name on a can of formula. But generic formula is just as safe as the name brand formulas. See for yourself by comparing the cans side by side. Same ingredients, same concentration of ingredients, same amount of product in the can - twice as much for the popular name? If you make this one switch alone, you could save hundreds of dollars during your baby’s first year.

Bottles
If you plan to formula-feed or feed expressed milk to your baby, you’ll need bottles. The money pits: bottles designed to be used with disposable liners, and purchasing bottles in a variety of sizes. Parents who take advantage of this latest technology pay a bigger price than those who stick with more traditional versions.

The cheapest route is to buy as few bottles as you can (which unfortunately means more frequent washings) that don’t utilize disposable liners. You’ll save $250 to $300 by resisting the siren song of liners. It’s also more economical to purchase all 8- or 9-ounce bottles, rather than different sizes. Obviously, your baby won’t need even half the room in those bottles at first, but it saves you from purchasing all new bottles in new sizes later.

A couple of caveats about bottles: if your baby has trouble with reflux or colic, your pediatrician may recommend a certain brand or style of bottle to reduce your baby’s discomfort (and restore your sanity). In this case, it’s worth the extra money for special bottles! Also, if you intend to use a breast pump, some pumps only work with certain brands of bottles. Before you buy a pump, make sure you know if you’ll need a specific (potentially more expensive) brand of bottle.

Table food
You might think those tiny jars of baby food are a bargain at around 50 to 75 cents each, but watch how quickly that adds up. A better option is making your own baby food. And when you’re in control, you don’t need to add sugar or thickening starches - and you can use organic fruits and veggies to make it even healthier. It may sound difficult, but it’s not - up until the last 50 years, people had been doing it since the beginning of time!

When you’re making dinner, boil and puree the produce that you’re fixing anyway. Tomorrow’s meals for your baby could be the peas and apples from tonight’s dinner. And foods such as bananas and avocados don’t need to be cooked at all.

When it comes to where your baby will be eating these exciting new table foods, many parents opt for high chairs. However, high chairs are usually large, cumbersome, and potentially expensive. How about a portable booster seat that you can use at home and take to grandma’s too? And bringing your own booster seat to restaurants saves the expense of purchasing those pricey highchair covers.

More tips:
- Most nursing mothers will go on and on about how important their nursing pillow is. But if that’s $40 you want to save for something else, a regular pillow works just fine. The point is that you need something to fill the gap between your lap and the arm that’s supporting your baby.

- The best formula value is those big cans of the powered stuff. Formula also comes in ready-to-drink containers and liquid concentrate, but you’ll pay big-time for that convenience. It’s super-easy these days to make the powered formula work - even if you’re on the go - so don’t fall for the convenience factor of the more expensive forms.

- There are a lot of bottle-feeding accessories on the market - some relatively essential and some not. If you own a dishwasher, you’ll probably want to invest in a basket that holds small bottle parts in the dishwasher. But things such as sterilizers, bottle warmers, cooler bags, etc. are up for debate. Check with bottle-feeding moms to see what they wasted their money on before you do the same.

Clothes Make the Baby (Expensive!)
When I look at the prices attached to most of the adorable little outfits on store shelves, I usually gasp, “How can they justify asking that amount for this tiny piece of material?!” But smitten parents pay those exorbitant prices all the time. Read on for tips on lowering your baby’s clothing expense.

Be Realistic
A lot of moms go crazy buying cute clothes for their little prince or princess. And while it’s true that many babies can go through two to three outfits on some days (due to a combination of spit-up and diaper leaks), it’s still not necessary to purchase 50 dresses or rompers in one size. If you do laundry twice a week (with all of the clothes, burp cloths, towels, washcloths, etc. that pile up on a daily basis, you’ll want to do laundry that often anyway!), you only need 10 to 11 outfits. And that’s assuming baby goes through three different outfits per day.

Think Ahead
If you intend to have additional children, it’s a good idea to buy as much unisex clothing as possible - especially during the first year when your son or daughter won’t mind wearing ducks, frogs, and other cute gender-neutral clothing. Of course you want to dress your little princess in pink ruffles, and that’s okay of course, but realize that as much clothing that you can reuse for baby number two (or three or four), the more you’ll save down the road if you have a child of the opposite gender.

Another way to think ahead is to purchase clothing on sale for upcoming seasons. It’s not always easy to determine what size your child will wear a year from now, but you can usually guess what he’ll wear six months from now. For instance, winter clothing may be drastically reduced in March, so pick up some warmer outfits that your child can begin wearing in September. The best way to estimate what size your baby will be is to evaluate how he seems to be growing now. If he’s off the charts in height and weight at three months, it’s a safe bet that he won’t be wearing six month-size clothing at six months. Use the same principle if your baby is at the bottom of the charts.

More Tips
- Only wash a few of the outfits your baby receives as gifts before he or she is born. You can return the ones with tags still attached and exchange them for larger sizes. You’ll be amazed at how much clothing you don’t use before your baby grows into a new size!

- Your baby’s feet will grow as fast as the rest of her, so to get maximum usage out of socks, buy tube socks (the kinds without a defined heel) that can grow with her.

- You’ll throw more clothes away because of stains than you will because of wear and tear the first year. If you can find a brand of stain remover that works for you, you’ll save tons of money on replacement clothing. And don’t automatically throw away any piece of clothing, no matter how bad the stain looks. There’s always hope!

- Clothes made of stretchy material can be worn longer than clothing without a lot of give - denim, for example - so your best value for the dollar is probably the yoga pants over the jeans.

Play it Again, Sam (or Kate or Emma…)
Many homes with babies sport toys on every surface. I often wonder how one infant is supposed to use all of them - and how much it cost the parents to stock their house so full of toys. If the clutter and the cost don’t appeal to you, there are methods for reducing both.

Toys Multiply Like Rabbits
Even if you buy absolutely no toys for your baby, they will appear in the form of gifts every couple of months. So do not purchase more than a couple of toys for your baby yourself. And really, infants don’t need many toys, since she’ll prefer to be entertained by mom and dad anyway.

The best toys for any baby are books. They provide hours of educational fun - not to mention quality time. Again, you’ll receive a lot of books as gifts. When you want to change up your reading material, hit the public library. Millions of books, all of them free - it’s the frugal mom’s paradise.

Recycle your own toys
The single best way to get the most usage out of your toys is to put them on rotation in your home. Every week or two, hide a third or more of your child’s toys. He’ll forget about them, and then when you bring them back out a week later, he’ll think they’re brand new.

Rebecca, 28, discovered this concept by accident. “My husband and I took our 10-month-old and three-year-old on a seven-hour car trip last summer, and I knew it would be a challenge, to say the least. Part of that challenge was that I only had room for so many toys in the front of the car to keep them occupied, and I had to keep half of their toys in the trunk. I ended up rotating them when we stopped for a break every hour or so. After a couple of rounds of this process, I realized that both boys got a real charge out of the ‘new’ toys that they had been sick of just an hour ago. I thought, ‘Ah ha! I can use this knowledge at home!”