Favorite Things - Baby Edition

I have a few friends that are currently pregnant that have asked me what baby things that we used, what we liked, and what we didn't like. I figured that I better hurry up with this post, because the baby days are quickly fading away. Keating's soft sweet toys have been replaced with activities such as pushing a pooper scooper around the back yard. So here is a list of our favorite things before I forget!

1. Fisher Price Lamb Chair- It has a more official name, but it you google it, it should pop right up. We just called it the Lamb Chair, and this lamb chair made my son sleep. Keating slept here for the first 6ish weeks of his life. Looking back, that makes me feel like a bad mother, but it was "Whatever works!" for us as first time parents. It is wonderful, it vibrates, and plays music, although he didn't care for the music. We also never used the mobile attachment, it just got in the way. It was a great babysitter when I just needed to hop in the shower really quick and could sit him on the bathroom floor in it. This thing traveled to every room of our house, luckily it is very light weight.
2. Diapers- I had strong opinions before Keating was born that we would only use Pampers, because Pampers were supposed to be THE BEST. Well I know that what works for one parent doesn't work for another, but Pampers were awful for us. They made for disgusting blowouts and lots of ruined onesies. A few months in, we switched to cloth. My favorite cloth brand is Fuzzi Bunz because they are trim, hold in everything, and have really great colors.
When Keating wears disposable diapers, (which he has a lot recently because I am too lazy to go up two stories to wash them) He wears the Target Up and Up brand , they are fantastic and I have never ever had a leak or explosion with them. They are also cheap at $13.97 for 96 of them or .14 a piece. I also like that they dont have stupid characters on them, just polka dots.
3. Tiny Love Mobile - This thing is hardly neutral and did not match our nursery, but he loved it. A friend recommended it to me when we started having him sleep in his crib. It plays classical music and the little characters have black and white accents that really caught his attention. When he was older he learned to turn it on by himself and he would stare at it forever.

4. Bottles - I tried a lot of different brands of bottles, but he would really only take the Coddlelife bottle. I liked it because it only have 3 pieces to wash, and seemed to transition flawlessly between breast feeding and bottle feeding. The one thing I didn't like is that they have to be ordered online. We only had 4 but we made it work.

5. Babywise - I know that every method isn't for every parent, but this was a GOD SEND for us. It helped us with getting Keating on a schedule, sleeping in his own bed, and sleeping through the night. Around 8 months he regressed a bit with his sleeping and I went back to it to get back on track. I think it gave him great sleeping habits. Now he will say "night night" when he is ready to nap or go to bed. Then lays in bed and puts himself to sleep. Of course he has his off nights, but over all he is a great sleeper and I attribute it to this. Had it not been for Babywise, I think he could still be crammed into his Lamb Chair or trying to sleep with us!

6. Swaddling - If I could tell every new clueless parent {like we were} one thing to do to help their baby sleep it would be swaddle, swaddle SWADDLE!!! I knew this before having a baby, yet when we brought him home from the hospital, I came to the conclusion that he didn't like it because he fought it. If you didn't read my blog when Keating was a newborn, he was a difficult baby to say the least. He would cry for what seemed like hours, some days it would be all day. Once we used the Swaddle me he would stop crying and calm down. This also helped him sleep because his little flying arms didn't wake himself up. We stopped swaddling him when he began rolling around and could get his arms out of it.



This is all that I can think of at the moment. These were the crucial things that we really couldn't live without, the things that made life as a new mom just a little bit easier. When you are walking around smelling like spit up and you look and feel like a zombie... it is the little things that count!