I am blessed with tons of family and great friends who
supplied me with everything I need to take care of a newborn baby. After enjoying
the initial baby shower plethora of gifts, I slowly began to realize something:
people don’t keep sending you
replacement outfits for the ones your baby outgrows! Nuts. I also quickly discovered
it was not so economical for us (like most families) to buy everything new.
Double nuts.
Of course I knew my guy would grow, but I was just too
wrapped up in the here-and-now to think about what came next. I remember my first trip to the baby
second-hand store in my neighborhood, and my jaw dropped. Near perfect outfits
and toys at a margin of retail were suddenly at my fingertips. I started paying
attention to garage sales and online listings like Craigslist for baby merchandise
and found the same thing. That’s the thing about babies: they grow fast and go
through toys quickly. Yay for me!
Some tips:
- Find out where ALL the baby second-hand stores are in your neighborhood. I guarantee you there’s more than one, and they tend to lurk in strange places like old strip malls or residential homes.
- Build a relationship with the owner of your favorite store. You’ll soon realize you need a place to give back all of the outgrown baby items you bought! J
- Go EARLY to garage sales that advertise big item baby things like activity gyms and strollers. Those buggers get picked over at the crack of dawn.
- Join some sort of “mommy” online community group in your neighborhood. Not only is it nice to have the company, these classifieds are rich in hard-to-find baby second-hand items.
- This is probably a no-brainer, but don’t buy everything you need for Baby second-hand. I’d stick to new car seats and new breast pumps. (Eww.)
Of course, where's the fun in NEVER buying something new?
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