Archive for the Category »baby «

07
Sep 2011

Fitting Children Into A Life We Love

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I got the following email from Connie in response to my post asking you what you wanted me to write about:

It feels like many of the decisions you have made came about as a result of both your values and preparing yourselves and your home for children. How might your decisions have changed if you hadn’t been planning to have children? I find that some priorities, like eating good quality foods and staying healthy are easy for me to implement now, but others are more difficult, in part because I am not planning to have children. I don’t have as much of a reason to settle down in one place, grow a garden, etc. I definitely want to do those things, but they get pushed to the backburner so much more easily when there are new adventures in new places to be had. I am preparing to move to CA, and there have been several discussions about whether to rent, buy, or buy a larger plot (terribly expensive) to accomplish some of those personal goals.

My instinctive reaction is to say that everything in our life would be different if we didn’t have children, since they’re such a huge part of our life.  But when I thought about it a bit more, I realized that isn’t the case at all.  It is difficult to imagine my life without children, but I can remember our life before our children arrived, and we have kept much of it the same.

My husband and I moved into our first apartment together nearly seven years before our first child was born.  We knew that we wanted children eventually, but we had a lot of stuff we wanted to do first.  We traveled at least once a year to relatively far-flung places.  We bought a house.  We started a business that would allow us to work from home.  Having our own business and working from home has been hugely beneficial in terms of parenting, but it’s something that we would have done regardless of our plans to have children.  It allows us a lot of flexibility and freedom, and we took advantage of that for several years before we had children.

Our current house with its huge backyard is excellent for children (what kid wouldn’t love a half acre to run around in?), but we were attracted to the backyard primarily for gardening purposes rather than as a play area for our children.  My husband and I are both devoted to healthy eating, and we both love growing our own food.  Although it’s hard to imagine my life without children now that I have them, I think that my husband and I would have been drawn towards a home with a sizable yard even if we hadn’t had children (or planned to have them).  We might have looked for a smaller house if it had been just the two of us, but I think that we would have ended up buying (rather than renting) and seeking out a place with a big yard where we could have our fruit trees and garden beds.  In addition, we both love dogs and will probably always have one.  Having a house with a yard is a big plus for the dog too – it’s a place where she can run around sans leash and chase a frisbee to her heart’s content.

Although our life does revolve around our children much of the time now (it sort of has to, given that they’re still so little), we’ve managed to fit our children into the lifestyle that we already enjoyed before they were born.  We don’t like rigid schedules (so we’ve avoided many of the over-scheduling problems that plague many parents of little children), we like being outdoors, we like being at home, we love gardening, we like finding free entertainment and enjoying the little things in life… those are all things that we have kept the same.

There’s no one-size-fits-all path in life.  Whether you’re planning to have children or not, you should seek out a path that makes you happy.  If that’s renting apartments for short stints so that you can travel the world, so be it.  If it’s settling down in a fixer-upper house with a yard and a garden and projects to last the next 30 years, so be it.  Or anywhere in between.  If you are planning to have children, you can focus on following your own desires and wishes and avoiding the “you should be doing xyz” traps that are perpetuated by advertising designed to separate your from your money.  You can raise happy, well-adjusted children in all sorts of unconventional settings, and you don’t need a ton of money, stuff, or a white picket fence to do so.  If you’re planning to not have children, you do have some more flexibility in terms of doing whatever you want, since nobody will be depending on you for food, shelter, and years of guidance.  Either way, focusing on your own goals will work much better than trying to keep up with what everybody else is doing, or what advertising tells you that you should be doing.

Connie, thanks for the question, and best of luck with your move to California!

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Category: baby, garden, just my life, kids, other bloggers  2 Comments
10
May 2011

Children And Money – Does It All Even Out?

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We’ve all heard how expensive children are.  And there are definitely some expenses that are tough to avoid.  We’re paying about $270/month for health insurance for our two boys, and there’s not really a way around that expense (we have a high deductible health insurance policy already, so that cost is on the low end of the scale).  We’re also putting $100/month into each of their college accounts.  Technically that money is still ours, and growing.  College accounts are not a necessity, but they’re something that we feel will be a worthwhile investment years in the future.

Other than health insurance and the college accounts, we have very little in the way of expenses for our boys.  We’re only three years into the whole parenting adventure, but we’ve managed to avoid a lot of the expenses that tend to go along with having very young children.  I still shop exclusively at Goodwill for our older son’s clothes, and our younger son is just wearing hand-me-downs.  We wanted to give our son a bike for his third birthday, and we found one on Craigslist for $20.  It needed a bit of work, and my husband spent a couple hours fixing it up before we gave it to our son.  But for $20, we ended up with a perfect birthday present that our son loves.

Our son adores trips to the library and the local parks.  He likes going for bike rides and feeding ducks.  He spends his days playing in the backyard, “cooking” in the living room with all of my pots and pans and utensils, drawing, and “crafting” with stuff like pipe cleaners and return address stickers that come in the mail.  It’s rare for us to spend money on stuff to entertain him (although we did spend $75 on a used train table earlier this year, and he’s had lots of hours of fun with it).  He mostly uses his very active imagination and the wealth of stuff that he finds in the house and out in the yard.  His clothing costs us next to nothing.  We did spend quite a bit of money on his mattress, but that’s something he’ll use for a long time, and we felt that it was worth the cost.

We don’t make trips to Target or Babies R Us.  We use cloth diapers exclusively, and have never purchased formula or baby food (our son eats what we eat, and has from the time he started eating solid foods, thanks to an inexpensive baby food grinder).  We try to keep clutter to a minimum, and that includes “kid clutter”.  We’ve found that we just don’t need most of the stuff that is marketed to new parents.  We kept all of the stuff we did use with our first son when he was smaller, and that means we literally need nothing at all for our second son.  I’ll probably look for a double jogging stroller sometime this summer once our baby is old enough to sit in one, but they are pretty easy to find on Craigslist.  Other than that, I can’t think of anything we need for our baby that we don’t already have.  I know that hand-me-downs won’t work forever, since we’re starting to get into the stage where our older son will be wearing out his clothes before he grows out of them.  But we have “free” clothes for our baby for at least the first three years.

One huge bonus that we have is that we don’t pay for child care.  We’re lucky, but we also put a lot of effort into establishing a home-based business several years before we had children.  My husband works full time at our business, and I work very part-time (about two hours a day right now) so that I can mostly be a stay at home mom to our boys.  Child-care is definitely a huge expense if you have to have it, but I know a lot of families have found that with a little creativity they can either switch to living on one income or two part-time incomes, or rearrange work schedules so that both parents can take turns being at home with the children.

Even though we’ve kept our child-related expenses to a minimum, just the health insurance and college accounts comes to nearly $500/month.  But there’s a flip side to the expenses that come with having children.  There are a lot of things that we aren’t spending money on anymore, that we probably would be if we didn’t have children.   Before we had kids, we usually took at least one vacation a year, usually to a relatively far-away destination.  We had more shopping trips, and weekend get-aways to little resort towns.  We went out to eat and to the movies…  These days, we much prefer to take our sons to the park or to the library.  Our younger son doesn’t care where he is as long as he can nurse whenever he likes and get snuggled most of the day.  Our older son is just as happy at a lake with a pail and a shovel as he would be at a beach on a tropical island.  We tend to focus our entertainment activities around things that are fun for a three-year old, and we’ve found that most of those things are free or very low cost.  We spent Mother’s Day at a huge park about ten miles from our house.  Our son’s best friend was there too, and the kids had a blast feeding ducks, riding their bikes, and playing on the playground.  Total cost:  $3 for the bread we got for the ducks.

So although we’ve found that there are definitely unavoidable expenses that go along with having kids, we’ve also found lots of areas where our expenses have dropped in the last few years, specifically because we have children.  I know that this won’t always be the case.  Ten years from now, I know I’ll be making a whole lot more food than I am now (leftovers might be a thing of the past!) and we’ll have more expenses for our boys as they approach young adulthood than we do now when they are little.  But I think that we’ll be able to stay pretty frugal with two kids as the years go by.  What do you think?  If you have kids, do you think you’re spending more or less overall than you were before you had kids?

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Category: baby, just my life, kids  20 Comments
19
Apr 2011

Settling Into Life With Two Boys

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Thanks for all the congratulations and well-wishes on the birth of our second little guy!  We’re doing great.  We’re settling into life with two boys, and so far, it’s awesome.  As far as frugality goes, we’re keeping on with our usual path.  One nice thing about having two boys is that we have boat loads of hand-me-downs from our older son that will be perfect for our new little guy.  I had planned to re-use a lot of the clothes even if we had a girl, but now we can re-use everything.  Several people have asked us what we need for the baby, and I honestly can’t think of anything at all.  The stuff that we used with our son went into the basement when he outgrew it, and we also learned with him that we didn’t need nearly as much stuff as the baby stores would like us to believe.

Our son is 11 days old now, and I noticed today that our credit card statement shows almost no activity at all over the last 11 days.  Having a newborn is a nice excuse to stay home, cuddle with your babies, and not go anywhere.  Which means no spending money, and that’s a nice bonus.

Last year, one of my friends decided to try cloth diapers, and bought a gently used set of all-in-one cloth diapers that she found on Craigslist.  She tried them for a few days, but decided she preferred disposables after all.  Then, being the awesome friend she is, she gave me the whole bag when I got pregnant!  We bought one package of disposables to use for the first few days after our son was born.  We wanted to keep things as simple and easy as we could at first, and delaying washing diapers for a few days made sense.  But by the time we used up the disposables, I was itching to get back to cloth.  We noticed that the disposables leaked a lot, which doesn’t happen with our cloth diapers.  And I hated seeing the garbage can fill up with diapers.  So now we’re back in the world of diaper washing, and we’re loving the all-in-one diapers.  They grow with the baby, so they should work for a good long while.

I just bagged up all my maternity clothes to give to my friend who gave us the diapers, since she’s hoping to have another child eventually.  I swapped them for all of the regular clothes that I hadn’t worn since last summer, and it felt like I was getting all new stuff – no shopping needed :)

It is nice to start out this time with some of the baby stuff that we didn’t get until our first son was older.  The Moby Wrap has already come in very handy, as has the ring sling that my mother and I made a few years ago.  Carrying our first son in a sling worked great, and I did  it until he was nearly two.  So this time around, I started right from the start, and our baby seems to like it as much as his big brother did.

I hope you’re all having a good week.  And while we’re on the topic of babies, let’s all send lots of good birthing vibes to Gina – aka the feminist Breeder – who is anxiously awaiting the birth of her baby girl.

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Category: baby, family  5 Comments
12
Apr 2011

It’s A Boy!

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Our second son arrived on Friday, and we’ve been enjoying a blissful few days of getting to know him. His birth was dramatically easier and faster than our first son’s, and I’m feeling great. We had another homebirth, and this time the baby arrived 20 minutes after the midwife did – there was barely time for her to set up her supplies. Our almost-three-year-old is thrilled to be a big brother, and my husband and I are equally thrilled to be parents to such great little guys.

 

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Category: baby  29 Comments
09
Feb 2011

A Big Boy Bed

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When our son was born, we bought an organic crib mattress for him.  He slept in our bed for a few months, and still comes in from time to time to sleep with us during the night, but most of the time he sleeps on his crib mattress.  Last year, we got a wooden toddler bed and moved the mattress into that, which had been working perfectly.  But with another baby on the way, we knew we needed either another crib mattress for the baby, or a twin mattress for our son so that we could take his little mattress and put it back in the crib for the baby.

My first thought was to just get another crib mattress.  The organic ones are available for a couple hundred dollars, and we’ve been very happy with the one we have.  But I knew that would be a relatively short-term solution.  Our son is going to outgrow the toddler bed and the extreme firmness of a crib mattress before we know it.  So although they are a lot more expensive, I started looking at organic twin mattresses. 

Given that a standard twin mattress can be bought for a couple hundred dollars, the price tags on the organic mattresses were a bit hard to swallow.  But I reminded myself that we’re frugal for a reason.  It’s not so that we can hoard money and just save it aimlessly.  Instead, we want to make sure that we use our money mindfully, on things that really matter to us.  There’s a lot of controversy about mattresses and the chemicals that are in them.  I don’t claim to know everything about the issue, but my gut instinct is to err on the side of caution when it comes to exposure to synthetic chemicals.  That’s why the only cleaning products that make their way into our home are baking soda, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, soap nuts, and Dr. Bronner’s soap.  It’s why we don’t use any synthetic chemicals on our lawn or garden.  It’s why we buy organic food. 

In general, I try to balance my desire for a toxin-free home with both our budget and with our efforts to be as environmentally-friendly as possible.  That means that we’re not going to replace stuff we have that is still in good shape (like our living room furniture, for example), just to get toxin-free versions.  But when we need to replace something or get something new, we try to choose the most environmentally-friendly and toxin-free version we can afford.

And that brings us back to searching for a mattress.  We wanted to get something that would last our son for a long time.  We looked at mattresses at a local organic bedding store, and of course the solid latex ones were divine.  They were also $1500 for a twin size.  We decided to go with an innerspring instead, and add a latex topper to it in a few years when our son is heavier and needs a softer bed.  The Green Baby Guide has addressed the fact that there aren’t a whole lot of choices available for reasonably-priced twin mattresses, and I agree.  I looked at both of the ones they mentioned, but didn’t buy either one.  The $600 Naturepedic is waterproof and from what I read, it’s just about as firm as the hard-as-a-rock crib mattress our son already has.  I know that’s perfect for babies and small children, but not as likely to be a good long-term solution.  While I liked the price tag on the $400 Natura Kidz mattress, it looks like soy-based polyfoam isn’t really that much of an improvement over regular polyurethane foam, and to get a truly “organic” mattress from natura Kidz bumps the price tag up to $1100.

I liked what I read about Naturepedic mattresses and their non-toxic fire protection system (another alternative to toxic fire retardants is wool, which is naturally fire resistant, but adds a lot more to the cost of the mattress).  Eventually I settled on their quilted organic cotton deluxe mattress for $700.  I felt that would give us a mattress that could be used long-term (with the addition of a latex topper as our son gets older) and was a good compromise in terms of price.  I ordered it from The Clean Bedroom because they offer a ten percent discount if you become a fan on Facebook.  That allowed me to get an organic waterproof mattress pad ($79) essentially for free.  There was also no tax and no shipping charge.

Since we were spending so much money on the mattress, I wanted to find a good deal on a bed frame.  We wanted a bed with a solid support under the mattress (so that we wouldn’t need a box spring) and we were looking for something with drawers so that we could move our son’s dresser into the baby’s room.  I also wanted something made of solid wood instead of particle board and veneer.  Happily, Craigslist rarely lets me down.  After a few weeks of searching the listings, I came across a bed that was exactly what we wanted.  Solid wood, drawers underneath, a solid platform for the mattress, and in excellent condition.  We got it for $160.  It looks a little odd right now, because we have the crib mattress on it while we wait for the new mattress to be delivered:

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We moved our son’s dresser into the baby’s room, and all of his clothes are now under his bed.  In addition, the big middle drawer holds all of his stuffed animals, so they aren’t crowded all over the bed anymore.

All in all, I’d say we did pretty well.  We ended up with a solid wood bed/dresser, an organic mattress that should last a long time, and an organic waterproof mattress pad, for a total of $860.  The mattress should be arriving any day now, and our son is very excited about his big boy bed.  The price was more than we usually spend on stuff like this, but in the nearly three years since our son was born, we’ve spent very little money on supplies for him.  And I feel good knowing that he’ll continue to sleep on a toxin-free mattress. 

The only thing that bothers me about this whole process is how unaffordable non-toxic mattresses are for a lot of people.  We’re thrifty and careful with our money, which helps us budget for larger purchases.  But we’re also fortunate to earn a good income and be able to afford something like this if we want.  For many families, a $700 mattress for a child is out of the question, no matter how carefully they budget.  It shouldn’t be that difficult to get non-toxic products.  I do feel like the tide is turning a bit in terms of people understanding that “better living through chemistry” might not be better after all.  Hopefully as time goes by, non-toxic products will start to be the norm rather than the expensive exception to the rule.

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Category: baby, kids, organic living  14 Comments
20
Jan 2011

Starting On Our Basement

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We’ve been in our home for more than a year and a half now, and have finally decided to tackle the basement.  We kept going back and forth on whether we wanted to put money into the basement now, or wait until we have the mortgage paid off.  Eventually we decided that it would be nice to have the finished space downstairs, even if it means our extra mortgage payments will be reduced for a while.  We’re still making extra mortgage payments, and at our current pace should have the house paid off in 2016.  Once we finish the basement, we should be able to bump up those payments again and hopefully pay off the mortgage in 2015 instead.

Three years ago, when we remodeled the kitchen in our old house, we opened a Home Depot credit card.  We used it to buy supplies for that project, and paid everything off within the no-interest time frame.  Since then, we haven’t used the card, and although we had kept the account open, we had long ago cut up the card.  But we noticed last week when we went to start looking at basement supplies that Home Depot was running another 12 month no interest program on their credit card.  Although we could have taken money out of savings to pay for everything up front, we decided we’d rather take 12 months to pay it off instead, and let our money continue to earn interest during that time instead.  We feel comfortable with no-interest financing deals as long as we do technically have the money on hand to pay off the entire balance  from the get-go.

In addition to all the supplies we were able to fit in our vehicle and trailer, we also ordered flooring for the entire basement, which we’ll be able to go back and pick up on the weekend.  We’re going with click-together laminate flooring again, as we really liked what we installed in our old house, and we’ve been very happy with the Pergo floor in our current dining/kitchen area.  We found a cherry laminate that we both really liked, and we’re really excited to transform our basement floors from concrete to something pretty.  Of course we’ve got a bit of work to do before we get to the floors…

Not only are we starting to work on the basement, we’re also installing a 10 x 12 outbuilding in the corner of our backyard, to give my husband another place to work, outside the house (away from the noise of our soon-to-be pair of children!).  We toyed with the idea of starting from scratch with it, but between running our business, me being seven months pregnant, taking care of a toddler, and beginning work on the basement, we decided to order a pre-fab shed and then just do the finish work ourselves.  We looked at a few places in town that would build us a shed, and found that our best deal was with Home Depot – a bonus, since we were able to put the cost on the HD credit card and can now spread that expense out over the whole year too.  The shed should be in place next Tuesday, and then we can paint it, put in insulation, drywall, interior paint, and the same flooring that we’re using for the basement.

So lots of projects going on around here right now!  When we renovated the kitchen in our old house, I was also seven months pregnant.  Maybe I’m just an extreme nester?  Stay tuned for updates… we’re planning a trip to the Habitat for Humanity Restore soon to look for doors, and we’ll see what other supplies we stumble upon while we’re there.

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Category: baby, home improvement, thrift stores  8 Comments
29
Oct 2010

Enter To Win A Copy Of The Eco-Nomical Baby Guide

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As promised, here’s another chance for you to win a great book about raising a baby without breaking the bank – or the environment.  Rebecca and Joy of Green Baby Guide are the authors of The Eco-Nomical Baby Guide, and they kindly sent me a copy.  I loved it, and knew that a lot of my readers would too.  So I’m passing my copy on to one lucky reader.  Since this is a paper copy rather than an e-book, I can only send it to a US address – sorry!  In order to enter to win the book, just leave a comment on this post, and I’ll be drawing a winner next Friday, November 5th.

The Eco-Nomical Baby Guide is a beautifully written, nicely packaged summary of most of the ways that my husband and I have been raising our son for the last two and a half years.  And how we’ll be raising our new little one.  Rebecca and Joy have a very similar approach to parenting and the environment as I do, and it’s great to see other parents raising their children without spending a ton of money or buying a bunch of chunks of plastic that will eventually sit in landfills for hundreds of years.

Although I was already doing a lot of the things that the book describes, I did make one big change after reading it.  Ever since our son was born, he’s been wearing home-made cloth diapers.  The diapers cost very little to make, and were extra eco-friendly as we used recycled fabric. We don’t own a dryer, so they have always been dried on the clothes line or an indoor rack.  But until I read The Eco-Nomical Baby Guide, I always washed them in hot water.  Since our son turned one, we have had a front loading washing machine, which uses a lot less water than our old machine.  But still, two or three times a week, I was using energy to heat the water to wash diapers.  I wash everything else in cold water, but for some reason I felt that I should be washing diapers in hot water.  And I always added an extra rinse cycle.  Our son is only in diapers at night now, and occasionally if we’re going to be out and about for a long time, so I’m only washing diapers about once a week now.  But the last two times I’ve washed them, I’ve used cold water, no extra rinse cycle, and I’ve added 1/4 cup of hydrogen peroxide to the wash.  The diapers are just as clean as ever, and the hydrogen peroxide is doing a better job of disinfecting the diapers than hot water ever was.  As Joy and Rebecca pointed out, hot water isn’t sanitizing diapers unless it’s boiling.  I wish I had thought of this two years ago, but better late than never.  Especially since our diaper washing days are going to start all over again in the spring…

The Eco-Nomical Baby Guide provides all sorts of great ideas for what baby gear really matters, how to find safe used items, and recommendations about eco-friendly supplies that might be best purchased new.  If you’re skipping most of the non-essential baby gear out there, you can better afford to buy the stuff that you really want for your child.  In addition, the book is packed with detailed info on cloth diapering (one of the best resources I’ve ever seen on the subject, actually), making your own baby food, green day care options, and ways you can put your craft skills to use and make things for your baby (as an fyi, I didn’t think I had any sewing skills what so ever, and yet our son has been wearing diapers I made for him ever since he was born – if I can do it, anyone can do it!).  Joy and Rebecca’s book would make a great read for anyone who has a baby or is planning to have one in the future.  It would also make a great gift for an expectant parent.  If you’d like to enter to win a copy, just leave a comment.  Good luck!

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Category: baby  48 Comments
22
Oct 2010

Thank You, And A Winner Of The E-book Giveaway

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Thank you all for the kind words you left on my post from Wednesday!  I’m about four months along, and Frugal Baby is due in early April.  We’re all very excited, and I’m looking forward to sharing our frugal adventures as a family of four.  So far, we have only purchased a car seat.  We will also buy a new organic crib mattress at some point, as we’re planning to have our son continue to sleep on his for quite some time.  Other than that, there is really nothing at all that we need.  Most of our newborn clothes are very gender neutral, although if we have a girl we’ll be on the lookout for some used clothing in larger sizes.  I’ve checked on Craigslist a few times and found huge lots of baby girl clothes for about 50 cents per item, so I have no doubt that we’ll be able to get everything we need very easily.  If we have another boy, we won’t need any clothes at all, as we have tons that our son has outgrown.  Some of his larger stuff is gender neutral too, like jeans and plain colored shirts that would work for a boy or a girl.  Almost all of the diapers that we’ve made over the last couple years are still going strong, so I doubt that we’ll need to make any more.  Now all we have to do is wait another five-ish months to meet our new little one!

There were 43 entries for the e-book giveaway that I posted last week, and I used random.org to pick a winner:  Cradled on the Waves, your e-book should be coming soon, directly from the author, Laura Cowan.  Congratulations!

I’m currently reading another great book about eco-friendly, frugal ways to raise a baby, written by the authors of Green Baby Guide.  When I finish it, I’ll be offering it as a giveaway too, so stay tuned.  And I hope you all have a great weekend!

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Category: baby, family, other bloggers  10 Comments
20
Oct 2010

Wordless Wednesday

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Category: baby  42 Comments
16
Sep 2010

Babies Don’t Need Themes In Their Bedrooms

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For a long time now, I’ve been amazed at how many people feel that they have to have a “theme” in their children’s bedrooms.  It starts before babies are even born, with parents picking out a nursery theme, and then it continues with new themes as the children get older.  I’m sure that retailers love the fact that parents are so sold on the idea of having a theme.  It’s a great way to get us to buy more stuff than we need, and to buy it all in one place.  After all, if the theme you love happens to be at Pottery Barn Kids, you’re likely going to buy everything there because it will all match.  This is craziness!

Our son has had the same room decor since he was born.  He will continue to have a theme-less room until if and when he chooses to paint the room or change it up however he likes when he’s older.  I remember my parents letting my brother and me repaint our furniture when we were probably around 11 or 12.  I chose pink, my brother chose black.  Our rooms were interesting, to say the least.  But definitely reflective of our own tastes!

So, what’s in our son’s room?

  • The crib that my parents got at a thrift store for $30 and then fixed up to make sure that it conformed to current safety guidelines.  We have two crib sheets (they don’t match each other) that my mother found at a thrift store.  He has three blankets:  a fleece quilt and a heavy winter quilt that were made by a friend, and the retro NFL summer blanket that I made.  None of them match anything else in the room.  We have a handmade wooden toddler bed that we got on Craigs List a while ago, and we’ll be switching him to that soon.  We want to keep him on his organic crib mattress for as long as possible, which is why we’re going to use a toddler bed instead of a bigger bed.  The toddler bed is stored in the basement for now.
  • A wooden rocking chair that my father made for my brother nearly 30 years ago.
  • A small dresser that my husband and I got at a thrift store when we moved into our first apartment in 2001.
  • A small shelf for toys.
  • A changing pad on the floor.  We bought a few used cloth diapers on Craigs List before our son was born, and the lady threw in the changing pad for free.  Otherwise, we’d have probably just used a towel.  We like having the changing pad on the floor – no possibility of our son rolling off of a changing table, and the pad on the floor takes up a lot less space.  Next to the changing pad is a basket where we keep our cloth diaper stash, and a plastic shoebox where we keep wet washcloths that we use as wipes.
  • Wall decor:  Two original paintings of tractors that were done by an artist friend of ours, a clock, and a Denver Broncos pennant that my husband managed to get signed by just about the entire Broncos team in the mid-80s.  It’s nicely framed and a perfect addition to a little boy’s room.
  • A thick, light-blocking curtain that I made using old sheets.

That’s it.  Nothing matches anything else in the room.  Everything is functional, clean and safe, but there’s definitely no theme.  The walls are the same off-white color that the previous owners of our house chose.  This is mainly because we like light, neutral wall colors, and because we can’t see any sense in painting over perfectly good wall color.  We did repaint the walls in our old house, because the paint job was about 15 years old and starting to show its age.  In this house, the paint is about two years old.

It’s natural to want to create a nice cozy space for your child.  But stop and think for a minute about the whole theme idea.  There’s no doubt that it was created by marketers who are trying to sell us on the notion that we have to have a whole set of matching nursery furniture, a set of bedding that matches the changing pad that matches the curtains… and even a lamp to match all of that.  We don’t need half the stuff that they market to us, and yet if it matches the theme that we’re using, we’re much more likely to buy it anyway.  And if we’re trying to keep everything very matchy-matchy, we’re unlikely to be creative and look around for second-hand furnishings, bedding and decor.

Keeping in mind that reducing consumption of “stuff” is good for the environment, our wallets, and our souls, it makes much more sense to decorate our children’s room using stuff we already have, things we can get used, and things we can make ourselves.  Paint is an easy, cheap way to spruce up a room (I highly recommend no-VOC paint.  We used in it in our old house, and the difference between that and regular paint was light night and day.  We slept in our bedroom just a few hours after we finished painting it, and couldn’t smell a thing).  Kids need very little in the way of stuff, including furniture.  For the things you do need, Craigs List and thrift stores are overflowing with kid stuff, including every type of furniture you could ever want (but don’t just buy a bunch of stuff because it’s cheap!  Clutter is still clutter, even if you get a great deal on it).  It’s actually pretty easy to furnish and decorate a child’s room without ever setting foot in a big box children’s retail store.  And it’s a good lesson to start teaching our kids early:  we don’t have to do things just the way advertisers say we should.

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