Denise Resting

Tag: parenting

  • Sustainable Kid Purchases – Midsummer Edition

    Sustainable Kid Purchases – Midsummer Edition

    Here is everything I’ve acquired this summer for my kid. It’s a maybe a bit more than usual on the toy front, and includes a big ticket item. Almost everything my son owns/wears/plays with continues to be secondhand.

    Stroller

    We had been interested in buying a more comfortable (for us and Boo) compact stroller than the umbrella stroller we’ve been keeping in the car, which I also bought used at some point for like $8. We ended up buying a compact travel stroller from a retailer that sells open-box items for kids – floor models, returns, etc. They inspect all their items to make sure they’re undamaged, although some may show some superficial signs of use. This is the Inglesina Quid, the exact stroller I wanted after researching options. It retails for $300 and I bought it for $140, tax and shipping included. This particular unit had been purchased from Amazon and returned (it arrived in a very taped-up Amazon box) and it was obvious it had never even been removed from the packaging. People just be buying shit from Amazon, returning it and not giving a single thought to where it ends up. It’s worse with fashion, because there’s no secondhand market of people seeking out those items – it basically just becomes garbage. Anyway, the stroller folds up small enough to fit in an airplane overhead bin, it weighs only 13 pounds and Boo seems to find it very comfortable.

    I also bought some accessories for the stroller, all from secondhand resale site Mercari. For those unfamiliar, people sell their used stuff on Mercari, so you’re buying straight from individuals and the item is shipped to you. Because of the shipping it’s a bit less sustainable than buying secondhand locally, but it does allow you to search for somebody selling the exact thing you’re looking for if you don’t see it on a local resale site like OfferUp. At the end of the day, I think it’s a great way to make sure your still-good stuff gets into the hands of somebody who wants to give it more use. I use it all the time to sell and buy. I bought a snack/drink tray that wraps around the handlebar (retails for $29.99) for 18.62 including shipping. I bought the stroller’s travel bag (retails for $29) for $18.58 including shipping. And I bought a caddy that hangs off the back handlebar (retails for $26) for $14 including shipping.

    Toys

    Complete Lego Duplo alphabet truck set for $10 from a neighbor on OfferUp.

    Giant box of Lego Duplo pieces, cars and characters for $46.85. This would’ve been a lot cheaper if I’d purchased it locally, because shipping alone was $16. However, buying them new would have cost much more. These are set aside to be a Christmas or birthday gift. I think the characters and cars will be great stocking stuffers.

    Boo loves cars, and I was interested in getting him something like Hot Wheels car tracks but didn’t want a bunch of pieces getting lost. This old Hot Wheels Sto & Go set folds up into itself with a carry handle, and because it’s all one piece, nothing can get lost. I’m pretty sure we had this same toy at my house when I was a kid. It came with a box of cars, too. This will also be a Christmas or birthday gift. I bought it on Mercari for $41.88 (again, shipping) but I actually bought this entirely with a balance I had from selling things there. Looks like Hot Wheels has a new, similar-looking version selling for $42, so I didn’t actually save money on this, but I still prefer giving already-existing toys another home to driving the production of more non-biodegradable toys when possible.

    I bought these new from Target during a sale, using a gift card. They’re Green Toys, a brand I don’t mind buying new because they’re made entirely out of recycled plastic. I broke out the cement mixer truck a couple weeks ago, but the rest are going to wait until a time we REALLY need a new toy to come out – another heat wave when it’s too hot to leave the house, an illness, etc.

    This little toy excavator came from Good Will for $1.99. When I take Boo to Good Will I usually find something for him to hold onto while he’s in the cart so he’s less fussy while I’m looking at things. Sometimes I buy the toy, sometimes I just put it back when we’re done. This one I bought.

    Clothes

    These all came from the same trip to Good Will as the toy excavator. The star jeans are fleece-lined and will be good for really cold days. I think this all cost about $18. 

    We have a children’s consignment store in our neighborhood that sells somewhat higher-end stuff, or rather they do not accept clothes from the retailers that just crank out cheap garbage. That means you’re getting still-in-good-shape high-end kids clothes for a big discount, but people will be like “I could’ve got four things at Old Navy for half this price.” I would remind those people that a person should not be able to buy a new shirt for $4. There are going to be some very questionable labor and environmental practices at play for that shirt to be $4. Anyway, these four items cost about $40. The shark shirt is Baby Gap, the cactus shorts are Boden, the teal western shirt is Wrangler and the brown jeans are Carhartt. I’ll probably be able to sell these right back to the same store when we’re done with them.

    This cute little western shirt came from the same store, for $7. Its tags have been cut out but I’m guessing it’s also Wrangler. I bought it with credit from selling there.

  • My Genius Son’s Favorite Toys at 11 Months

    My Genius Son’s Favorite Toys at 11 Months

    My precious baby just keeps growing up. Nothing brings me as much joy as watching him learn new things and then absolutely beam, delighted with himself, as he does them over and over and over. This month he has learned he can throw things, and the whole house is enjoying the benefits. Suddenly the dog’s diet is much more varied, I find sweet treasures in corners he can’t even get to, and nothing stays on the coffee table long enough for it to feel cluttered. Soon we’ll have a one-year-old, and nothing makes me feel the rapidity with which I’m cruising down the conveyor belt of my own life quite like watching him grow up so quickly. I wrote about his favorite toys at ten months old, and decided I should update that list now that his tastes have matured another month.

    This fish is a cat toy. My dad gave it to him for Christmas as a joke, because he had seen some video where somebody had affixed the fish to their baby’s bottom so it could pat the baby to sleep. The idea of a baby being patted to sleep is wild to me. My own baby needs 20 minutes to confront the contents of his own mind in absolute darkness to even think about going to sleep and it’s that, along with the fact that he screams if he isn’t fed every two hours, that assures me he’s actually mine. My son loves this fish. He sits on the floor gnawing on it like Gollum until the battery runs out, which is about five minutes. We keep a portable charger in the diaper bag just for this fish. I send photos to my dad all the time of the baby playing with this fish, and each time he asks me if I’m just humoring him. I’m not. This is my son’s favorite toy. We use it without the catnip.

    Like many babies, my son adores bath time. He gets to sit naked and shriek with laughter while chewing on a penguin, and as we get older we get fewer and fewer of those opportunities. He would sit there splashing all night if he could. But he can’t, because of all the toys we put in the tub with him, this tub stopper is his favorite. He allows himself to be tempted briefly by a few of the other toys, but he won’t rest until he’s got this toy into his hands. And then like some Shakespearean tragedy, as soon as he gets what he so desperately wants, bath time is over.

    My son loves to play with whatever’s on the coffee table, so we like to arrange a variety of toys there for him to interact with. But if this cup is on the coffee table, it’s the only thing he wants. He returns over and over to the cup, clumsily grabbing at the handles and eventually finding the straw with his slobbery little mouth. Sometimes he gets mixed up and tries to suck on the bottom of the cup for a while, but eventually he figures it out. It’s kind of hard to get much water out of these cups, but if allowed the opportunity, my son will drink every last drop. Babies aren’t supposed to drink that much water at once, but try telling that to this guy. So if you’ve got something you really need to get done and need to keep your little one occupied, and you’ve got time to go to the hospital later, these cups are great for keeping little mouths busy (and quiet!). Comes as a two-pack for play in multiple rooms.

    These Pacifier Clips are really handy for keeping your little one’s pacifier or teething toys from falling out of their mouths and onto the disgusting ground. And obviously it’s important to keep babies from putting something from the ground into their mouths. Obviously it’s possible to even do such a thing. Obviously your baby isn’t going to do something absurd like, for example, crawl rapidly across the room to clamp his mouth onto the tire of his own stroller when given the opportunity. Anyway, while we do use these clips to attach toys to his stroller or carrier when we’re out and about, they get much more use on their own. He likes to crawl around with one of these clips in his mouth, checking on all the parts of the house he’s responsible for overseeing. Eventually he’ll get distracted by something and he’ll drop it, and then it’ll lie there on the floor, dripping wet, forgotten.

    If these aren’t toys then explain to me why my son is playing absolute games with them. I can say with complete certainty that no human has ever pooped as much as my son. I’m talking six to eight times a day. I change him first thing in the morning because he wakes up in a literal suitcase of his own pee, and within five minutes he needs another new diaper because he has pooped. That’s fine. That’s normal. He’s up and moving around, he’s had his milk, it’s going to happen. But then he poops again 30 minutes later. And another 30 minutes later. And these are not small amounts of poop. These diapers are full. I can’t comprehend where it’s coming from. It makes me think my baby is just sitting there at all times, nothing but poop from foot to shoulder. When I hold my baby, I am holding poop. When I kiss my baby, I am kissing poop. As bedtime approaches, the trash can full and my bank account empty, I sit in fear because I don’t know when it’s safe to put him to bed, when I can feel assured we won’t have to change another diaper. Definite favorite toy. Highly recommend.

  • Reminder to Self that Dads Can be Tired, Too

    Reminder to Self that Dads Can be Tired, Too

    Here in Seattle, we recently had several days that never got above freezing. It was in the high teens for some of them. It was truly awful. With a baby at home who, when fussy, can only be appeased by walks in the front-facing carrier, it was a tough several days to get through. On one of those days, our electricity kept briefly shutting off. Pipes were bursting at schools and restaurants. A coworker mentioned that she doesn’t even own a legitimate winter coat because we aren’t used to these conditions here. But there’s always at least one person in the Zoom meeting or in line at the post office who’s from Minnesota, and they won’t be able to sleep at night if they don’t let everyone around know that this is nothing.

    Everyone hates that person.

    Things can be hard even when they’re harder somewhere else. The pinched nerve in my neck from sleeping weird can hurt even if somebody else broke their foot. My miscarriage isn’t any less devastating if somebody else has had three.

    Just because new parenthood is almost definitely harder for mom, it is still hard for dad.

    As the mother, my body is the one that gave and gave of itself until new life emerged. If breastfeeding, it’s probably the mother up throughout the night feeding the baby. It’s most likely the mother dragging herself out of bed each morning when the baby wakes and needs food again. It’s the mother whose hormones are surging and plummeting and loosening her joints and scrambling her brain. It’s the mother whose vagina or abdomen has been stretched wide and stitched back up. Breastfeeding mothers can’t take medicine when they’re sick and they can’t hit the coffee too hard when they’ve been up all night.

    When my husband complains that he’s tired, that he didn’t sleep well, I feel immediately irritated. I’m so tired, every day. Until recently I hadn’t slept through the night in well over a year. And now that I can sleep through the night, I wake up obscenely early in order to take advantage of the only possible time I can have to myself all day, and I consider this time absolutely vital to my mental health. And I try not to complain about it, because complaining won’t make me any less tired. When my husband complains that he’s tired, it feels to me that he doesn’t realize that I’m always tired. It feels to me that perhaps he expects to not be tired, and is disappointed that today that isn’t the case. That he doesn’t realize we now live in a tired house. That now that we have a baby, tired is just the default.

    It’s hard not to feel the same way about everything. Oh, you’re finding the baby’s crying stressful? Well I’ve been home with the baby all day. Oh, you want a few minutes to yourself? The baby is literally with me when I pee.

    But dad’s life has also been turned upside down. He really is tired. He really is sleeping worse. He’s being assaulted by a slew of new anxieties every day. He’s mourning the loss of the Saturday afternoons he used to spend watching college football, the Friday nights when mom and dad could have a few beers and watch a movie without having to wake up early and supervise a creature increasingly determined to injure himself.

    I’ve never been a dad, and so I cannot, obviously, understand how dads feel. But I do believe new parenthood is almost always objectively harder for the mother, and I’m suspecting that might actually be one of the most difficult parts of being a new dad – that life got way harder, but nobody wants to hear about it because it’s even harder for someone else. It may seem like they aren’t allowed to express that they’re having a hard time. It may seem like nobody cares.

    This is all just to say that this wonderful journey of raising our precious little hell demons is allowed to be hard for everyone. My hard time is not inherently trivialized by my husband’s. We both need support from the other, and to feel like it’s okay to express how we’re feeling. A dad in his Seattle winter can live alongside a mom in her Minnesota winter and it can be very hard for both of them. This is something I need to try to remember.

  • My Genius Son’s Favorite Toys at Ten Months

    My Genius Son’s Favorite Toys at Ten Months

    Babies are always changing, aren’t they? One minute you’re standing outside the hospital door, holding this brand new creature you finally get to take home, and the hospital won’t even let you back in even though you’ve realized you literally can not do this, and the next minute your little one is crawling and babbling and getting screaming mad because he can’t have your entire sandwich. It feels like just yesterday my little guy desired simply to get his foot into his mouth, but with great pride I have watched his interactions with the world evolve and grow ever more sophisticated. Here is a list of his favorite toys at ten months old:

    If I remember correctly, this is a pretty nice spatula to cook with. My memory is fading, though, because this has been on the floor of my son’s bedroom for two months. It’s very good for experiments – what will happen if he hits a stuffed bird with the spatula? What will happen if he hits a ball with the spatula? What will happen if he hits a book with the spatula? This thing keeps my little scientist busy.

    I’ve been using mason jars for food storage for years because they utilize vertical space well in the fridge. The lids rust, though, so at some point I replaced them with these. Now I understand that I misread the description – these are actually toys. They slide like an air hockey puck, they flip like a Solo cup, and they can be rolled with ease like my second Geo Metro. I was so embarrassed when I realized I’d been using a toy in my kitchen all along. I just hope neither of my dinner guests noticed. We keep one of these in every room of the house.

    My son loves balls, and this ball for dogs is by far his favorite. This isn’t the exact ball, but I can’t find a link to one that’s coated with the saliva of a 45-pound lab mix. If you have a dog, imagine for a minute the things your dog has eaten or tried to eat. Consider what he or she licks. And consider how diligently you’ve washed your hands before even touching anything that would go into your precious baby’s mouth. It’s all a waste of time.

    These slippers are very cozy. They keep my feet warm on chilly mornings. I also understand them to be quite delicious, as whenever my little one gets his hands on one it goes straight into the mouth. I’ve gotten pretty curious about what they taste like, honestly. I’ve considered giving them a little lick myself. But I do like to wear them on my feet and, unlike my child, I cannot get my foot into my mouth.

    My son absolutely adores the photo frame wall I spent weeks meticulously arranging. When he’s fussy, he enjoys being carried slowly up the stairs so he can admire the photos, which are all of him. Gazing upon his own face soothes him when the world around him is ugly or boring or continuously doing gravity to him. He reaches out and grabs the photos. He babbles softly as he smudges the glass. He laughs with delight as he knocks them to the floor.

    If you’re looking for a gift that will impress, look no further than this bad boy right here. The second my son hears the dishwasher door open he starts hand-slapping his way across the floor as fast as he can and tries to climb inside. I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know why he wants to be inside the dishwasher. Despite having never actually been inside it, the inside of the dishwasher is my baby’s favorite place in the house. The smile on his face as he makes his way to the open dishwasher terrifies me. I worry I’m going to close his tiny little fingers in the door as they try desperately to pull it back down. I’ve stopped even trying to use the dishwasher. I wash my dishes by hand now, as fast as I can before the rats come. The special little guy or gal in your life will love this gift.