Useless junk you keep using.
One of the problems that we have in our house is all the marginally useful junk that we’ve collected in the last 15 months that we just ‘keep using’ for some reason.
The thing that comes to mind is the Baby Trend Zanzibar High Chair. I think we got it as a gift, so please don’t take offense from what I’m about to say, but I’ve come to basically hate this chair. If you haven’t bought one, here’s what you should look for in a high chair:
- Easy to clean. No fabric at all would be perfect. Easy to remove fabric would be okay. Being able to put the whole thing in the dishwasher is even better.
- Baby sits upright. No reclining. He/she should sit, using their own power, in an upright position. I don’t know why this strikes me as so wrong, but it really does.
- No complicated mechanisms. Remember: You’re going to be dealing with a squirming wiggling writhing mass of baby, pureed yams, milk and cheerios. You don’t want to be fussing with levers and switches when getting baby in and out.
- Lets baby sit “at the table” like an adult. This will make baby happy, and give you a way to transition him/her to being a real “table sitter” later in life.
So, the funny thing is that we also own one of these Fisher Price Healthy Care Booster Seats, and it absolutely fits the bill.
I’ve been wondering why we don’t just use the Fisher Price one all the time. Its a better chair, Mr. Busy Belly likes it better, and it fits every chair in the house, so we can use it at the dining room, outside, or wherever. Its easy to clean (plastic!) and helps keep him upright all the time. I think its just that we wouldn’t know what to do with the Baby Trend high chair if we decided not to use it.
And, that leads me to my real pont: What do you do with all the useless junk that you keep using? We’ve got so many toys that Mr. Busy Builder doesn’t really like anymore, or that’s either too young for him, or too old for him. We’ve got all kinds of things like play mats and motorized swings and daiper wipe warming boxes, and I just don’t know what to do with it.
Much of it came to us as gifts from friends & relatives, and some as hand-me-downs from our other friends with older kids, but not there’s so much stuff that we basically have a whole room overflowing with unused baby junk.
What do you do with this stuff? What if you’re having another kid? Did you reuse it all? Are there things that just aren’t good the second time around? What about all that stuff that seemed like a nice present, but is now just taking up space in your crowded house? Help! I’m buried in baby junk!
We did a huge purge between #1 and #2. And, after getting almost nothing for #2, we’re doing another huge purge before #3. Each kid has a single drawer of clothes because, let’s face it, we do laundry almost every day. In the last couple of weeks we’ve given away nearly half their toys, and this is after another big purge a few months ago. I’m not interested in keeping things that they play with for 15 minutes every 3 months. It was tough to give away new or almost new toys, but I just keep focusing on the fact that some kids have nothing to play with at all. Blocks and cars and musical instruments hold their attention for long periods of time so mostly they stayed, but they also like to play with things like screwdrivers and bike locks. It seems to spur their imagination to have more open-ended things to do. I think if we had no toys (once past the putting everything in their mouth stage since you don’t want them chipping teeth chewing on metal), they would be fine with nothing other than household stuff.
We have a place we take stuff here. When you come up on the 20th, you can bring a bunch of stuff that we can donate for you. (Let me know if you’re not going to since otherwise we’ll go this week. And if the baby comes before next weekend then all bets are off.) Or you can post it on Craigslist or Freecycle because some people would be thrilled with shit like that.
As time goes on we are becoming more minimalistic. Some stuff does make our lives easier but we weigh that against how big of a pain it is to have so much stuff lying around. Picking up for our cleaning woman this week hardly took any time at all because we gave away so much.
Hi Author can I be permitted to quote some of the facts from this above post if I post a link back to your original post?