Essential Baby Gear

Nothing like babies to open your heart and open your wallet, right? Welcome to part two of my three-part series on baby-related material acquisition. My last post, on the showers, documented a fairly typical aspect of the baby preparation process. The same can be said for the planned subject of the final post of this series: decorating the babies’ room. This middle post, however, is a little more shameful.

Let’s start with the most justifiable of my recent impulse buys: the baby books! Because we have done oh-so-reliable a job of documenting my pregnancy here on this blog, I decided that baby books were a an obvious must-have for us. Actually, I am hopeful that we’ll be able to make ourselves fill these out, because I remember thoroughly enjoying looking through my baby book when I was younger. Also, with twins, we have a unique opportunity to neglect each child’s baby book equally, rather than going all out with the first kid’s and then forgetting about the second kid’s except for a hastily scrawled “you were born and now you’re in the fourth grade.”

So baby books it was to be, although I probably didn’t have to spring for top-of-the-line baby books. But these had several appealing features: first, they aren’t too cutesy. Second, they are both gender neutral. Third, they coordinate without matching. Fourth, the company offers an optional twin insert page pack, which of course I snapped up right along with the books. Fifth, they were running a buy two, get one cat free special.

We’ve started filling out the pre-birth pages, and even Matt, who was initially skeptical, admitted that it’s kind of fun. When you come to visit us after the babies are born, be sure to badger us to make sure we’re keeping up with them.

This next purchase is also not at all frivolous. In planning ahead for our post-partum hospital stay, we realized that it simply wasn’t practical to expect to lug in our much loved but cumbersome SLR with external flash to capture all those wondrous and bloody first moments. We needed something small and fully automatic. But what, were we going to use cell phone cameras? I don’t think so. So a cute little point-and-shoot (one highly recommended by our photography buff friend Ken) is now standing by, ready to go into the hospital bag and snap zillions of photos that you will all have to look at one at a time and go “awwwwww” convincingly for each and every one.

Okay, I’m going to try to convince you that this last item is also a baby gear essential, but I can’t even make myself fall for it, really. This is my new iPod Touch. You might think that this is an awfully impractical thing for me to buy myself when we have two babies, and all their attendant expenses, on the way, but think of all the ways this will improve the babies’ lives:

1) I will be able to enter Trixie Tracker data from anywhere in the house, thus keeping meticulous track of every diaper, burp, and grunt.

2) I will be able to create baby-specific playlists according to their personal musical tastes.

3) I will be able to have hand-held internet access even during the early days when I am confined to the couch constantly feeding babies, thus discouraging me from becoming one of those lame, out-of-touch moms.

4) I will be able to carry photos of the babies around with me on the large, high definition screen, thus enabling all interested parties (by which I mean everyone I run into, of course) to see their adorability in crystal clear technicolor.

5) I will not resent the babies for forcing me to give up my dreams of having an iPod Touch in order to save my money to give them a better life.

I have also tried to distract you from the frivolousness of this purchase by including a photo of my 34-week belly. Big, right? Makes the iPod look insignificant. Hardly worth noting. La la la.

Filed under Baby Stuff | Tags: gear, Pregnancy, self-delusion | Comments (3)