Especially if you feed them pre-packaged food! I do err on the side of granola, FYI, but I try not to judge people out loud for their choices! Inside my head I’m pretty elitist and quite high and mighty, but I’m not going to go out of my way and tell someone that they are lazy or wrong for doing/not doing something the way I would. Tomayto, potahto, you know? So, here are the things I do that have majorly impacted our finances:
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Breastfeeding. Before we found out the extent of our daughters allergies and gastric disease, I breastfed. Formula is seriously high priced and seemed like too much of a pain in the ass to me. All I had to do was find a discreet place to sit down, cover up and Baby was happy. No mixing, no warming, no getting up in the night (we also co-slept. It was the only way any of us got any sleep!) Plus it forced me to take a load off every couple of hours. I had a perfect excuse to sit in the rocking chair and stare at her or read a book! My daughter weaned at just shy of 12 months. If you figure a “good” formula is about $.31/oz, we saved a little over $3,000 in the first year. http://www.kellymom.com/bf/start/prepare/bfcostbenefits.html#table1 This is where I got the numbers. Before knowing the extent of Mia’s conditions, we would have been getting something like nutrimigen had we not breastfed. I dare say that $.31/oz would be conservative by this time.
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Blenderize! Before I had a baby, I worked in daycare. Even then I didn’t understand why jarred food was so superior. When my daughter weaned to sipper cups and solids, she ate what we ate, just blended up into baby friendly fare. Granted it made her break out like crazy, but the point is that it really wasn’t a hardship to chuck it into the processor, freeze it in an ice-cube tray and pop it into ziplocks later. All I had to do was get a cube and microwave it. http://www.wholesomebabyfood.com/cost.htm This site compares the cost of jarred and home-made babyfood by brand. Plus jars are wasteful if you don’t recycle. Down, hippy!
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Cloth Diapers. I get freaked out just thinking about the chemical gels…ew. Cloth was a choice at first, but it turned out to be the best choice for allergies. The upfront cost is skeevy, but by the end of the first year you’ve only spent about $600 or so with cloth (and that is EVERYTHING from the dipes to the energy used to wash/dry…IF you use a dryer!) It doesn’t hold a candle to the $2,000 using the cheap disposables in a year. http://babyslime.livejournal.com/151952.html This is a great article on the cost, how “hard” it is and environmental impact. My husband could care less about the trees and animals, he liked the dollar signs! And this next link is for the cost calculator to plug in your diapers and see how much you could spend or save http://www.diaperpin.com/calculator/calculator.asp I haven’t perfected being perfect, so we cheat a little bit. We have found that cloth at night just won’t work, no matter how “nighttime rated” they are. So we use Seventh Generation disposables at night. They don’t have plastics or use chlorine and are the only brand I’ve found that won’t make her little butt break out. I only have to buy diapers once a month unless I get behind on the diaper laundry
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Baby wipes. I flex on these. Mia is allergic to every brand we’ve tried except the Seventh Generation wipes, and you don’t get any more bang for your buck there than you would with other brands. Before she was born, we were gifted and given a ton of baby washcloths without the biase taped edges, almost raw. I nabbed an empty wipes container and filled it with water, one drop of bleach (that helps keep the beasties from growing, and no, it doesn’t hurt. One little drop in a couple of cups of water, people) and if your kid can use shampoo, a drop of that. I cheat on this one. I use them when she hasn’t pooped. When she does, I keep a roll of TP to wipe her and flush that and then use the washcloths. They go in with the diaper laundry.
