What’s good for the goose may be good for the gander, but what works for you & your baby may not work for me & mine (and vice versa). I learned this the hard way.

Cloth diapers: I was really intent on using cloth diapers. I received a bunch through our baby registry and bought my own as well. I think we ended up with 16 from bumGenius. Sherry over at Young House Love (love those guys!) made it sound so easy. And in her defense, it wasn’t not easy, but it wasn’t a good fit for us. We started with the cloth diapers about a month after Linden was born. Honestly, spraying off the poop wasn’t that horrible. But oh the laundry! Each load of diapers needs to be run through the wash several times. I was going to be returning to work full-time, I didn’t have that much time to commit to laundry. (Sherry works from home.) As it turned out it became a moot point when I started back at work because cloth diapering and day care do not mix. (Sherry’s baby wasn’t in day care.) The day care won’t cloth diaper unless you rent theirs. Um, no, we already give you $1,600/month. So I thought we’d just cloth diaper in the evenings and on weekends. But that generates one or two dirty cloth diapers a day during the week (we put her in 12-hour disposable diapers over night). Do you know how long you have to hold onto soiled diapers until you’ve generated even a semi-full load at 2 diapers per day. Gross. It’s my understanding that there is a thriving market for (very) gently used cloth diapers. Hit me up, $10 a pop.

Over-preparing: I wanted everything to be ready upon the baby’s arrival because I figured that would be easiest. Maybe it was easiest, but it was also incredibly wasteful. Do not open everything that you buy or receive before the baby is born and for the love of god, hang onto those receipts. Had I not opened and washed all of the cloth diapers I could have returned some of them. We also had at least half a dozen pacifiers, sterilized and ready to go. Well wouldn’t you know, Linden always shunned a pacifier. Okaaaaay… And although people may use them in different ways than we did, we did not need 2 dozen receiving blankets. We just ending up using the same 4 to 6 over and over.

Bottles: Plastic bad. Glass good. So we registered for and received 4 lifefactory bottles. (Sherry only needed four bottles total; she also breastfed almost exclusively for more than a year. I more or less didn’t breastfeed, but that is a post for another day.) It may be easy to pour pumped breast milk into those bottles on the rare occasion that one uses them, but it’s a bitch and a half to pour powdered formula into those narrow bottle tops. At least 1/4 of each scoop ended up on our countertop. We still use them, but only after all of the plastic bottles (hey, they are BPA-free) are dirty. Another strike against them? They are too heavy for Linden to hold on her own.

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If we have another baby, hopefully I’ll be smarter about these and many other things. It’s important to take into consideration how we live and our circumstances before trying to adopt the choices of others.