Gifts for babies

Someone else wrote a locked guide to good gifts for babies (at, say, a shower), here’s some of our own.

Clothing is nice, especially if the mother is like me and disinclined to spend a lot of money on new clothes that the child is going to wear for about a month in each size. It’s also bit hard for a big baby, because it’s nice to have things in the bigger sizes (00, 0, 1) that the baby will soon be in rather than gorgeous stuff in 0000 and 000 that the baby will grow out of around about the same time the mother is able to leave the house regularly, but the season will also change, so you often can’t get stuff in both the right projected size and the right projected season for the baby. If you are a shopping ninja though, and can get cross-season stuff, I salute you.

Babies love stripes and patterns, and if you get striped or boldly coloured clothes, they entertain themselves staring at their own limbs.

My mother has been good at getting me cheaper layer-able stuff: singlets, sloppy joes, socks. That stuff comes in lovely bold colours. She also has a lot of luck with op-shopping (thrift, in US English): babies grow out of stuff fast enough that it’s usually in good condition. You might not feel able to give secondhand things as a shower gift but you could give it more informally.

Infant hats are super-cute, but they are invariably one-size-fits-all* (*except for any baby with a head circumference about the 75th percentile).

We loved wraps when Vincent was smaller and since he started breaking out of swaddles we love sleeping bags. These also have a seasonal problem, but people think to give wraps more than sleeping bags at the moment, so you could be the handy person who gives the size 0 bag.

For toys, those Lamaze and similar toys seem like overkill, combining brightness, patterns, big chunky grabbable bits, crinkly cellophane sounds, rattling bits and teething rings into one single toy… but they are the toy to end all toys from about two months until at least Vincent’s age now. As I write he is alternating holding Dino down near his feet so he can kick him, and biting him. It seems you can’t get too much stimulation in one go, as a baby. Only television could be as interesting. (Vincent has only watched TV incidentally, but cooking shows are great, because of the colours.)

Those “baby’s first book” things with the huge fat pages and lots of colour and texture surprised me with how good they are: Vincent could turn the pages in a fashion from about three months old.

My mother correctly advised us that babies don’t need scads of toys (really, I guess children don’t either): Vincent has about six toys total now and he doesn’t get bored. But for a month or so we had no toys at all, which is too much the other way. Babies do like them!

Vincent never had one of those play mats with toys dangling above (like this) but some of the mothers’ group babies had them and V seemed to enjoy them a lot when visiting in the months where he’d stay on his back if put there. He always loved mobiles and wind chimes when he got a chance to see them.

I only learned just today that you can get head supports for tummy time. We were hardcore. If he wanted his head lifted up, he had to lift it.

We’ve loved our slings, first a Hug-a-Bub and now a mei tai by Enviro Baby but I think these are more individual. If you could get some kind of babywearing gift certificate with a post-birth trial session… but I don’t think you can do that in suburban Australia.