Intro post

[brigid]

Hello. I'm Brigid and I'm 30 and recently had my first baby.

I'm getting more and more frustrated with mainstream parenting and baby sites and blogs which assume that parents have more money than sense. Most baby things are incredibly and pointlessly expensive, and awfully gendered. This looks like a good and sensible place to get away from that mind set.

I look forward to discussion on this community.

Comments

[inspiral_rose]

Welcome and I agree on the ridiculousness of pricing. Babies grow out of things so quickly, it's insane. I didn't realise until I saw the Story of Stuff a few years ago that 99% of what is bought in America (not just kids' stuff) is thrown out within the first year. That's disgusting!

I use Freecycle a lot. We've got the baby change table from there and a breast pump and lots of other items that I just look at in the shops and think "Oh well, not paying that much so I guess I'm not getting it."

[brigid]

I don't have the patience to sort through Freecycle's low signal to noise ratio, so I just do craigslist and thrifting (the freecycle groups near us are email groups, not bulletin boards or forums or what have you).

We got a really nice, sturdy, wooden crib on craigslist for $25. New it would have run us hundreds of dollars. There's nothing wrong with it other than some teeth marks, which it's only going to accumulate more of.

[inspiral_rose]

I use my email filter rules to look for things I want (right now, any post with 'baby' or 'child' in the subject line).

Craigslist would be great if I lived in the US. Nothing quite like it here. Gumtree is a little or trying to be, but still not really.