New Mummy blog: You don’t need to buy EVERYTHING

While I was pregnant, I was the recipient of what is probably the only useful round robin email ever to hit my inbox. It didn’t contain threats of some awful fate befalling me or my loved ones if I failed to pass it on, nor did it promise me a share in some distant, deceased despot’s millions if only I gave them my bank details first.

Instead, this email was sent to me by a dear friend, recently having had a baby herself, along with the promise that this would change my life – or at least save me from baby-induced bankruptcy. And it did, for it contained a spreadsheet created by and added to by new mums, entitled The Definitive Baby Shopping List.

If you’re pregnant, you’ve probably had one, or something similar. If not, hunt one down. For anyone who is lost in the wilderness of preparation for the arrival of baby number one, it is invaluable.

As soon as you sign up to the pregnancy tracking sites and apps, or you search online for something baby-related, before you know it you’re inundated with ‘helpful’ emails and targeted ads from many major baby-related retailers with list upon list upon list of things you absolutely must buy for your baby.

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When you are as clueless as I was pre-Honor, it’s very easy to slide into a blind panic, and in an effort to give your baby the very best start in life, think you need to buy everything. Everything. Even that weird nasal decongestion pipette, that looks like a mini turkey baster and is used to extract snot from your poor, cold-riddled, bunged-up baby’s nose. Actually, that’s a bad example, as believe it or not, it’s actually quite useful, if somewhat gross.

But this list lifted the wool from my eyes. Divided up into neat little categories, it listed everything you genuinely need, and everything you don’t, before baby’s arrival. Next to each item was a comment from each mum the spreadsheet had been passed on to. I lost track four or five names in – by this point, the feedback was from people I had never met, and I could see from some of the comments we had rather different lives. When it was suggested that the Bosnian nanny could pick up a specific-to-Eastern-Europe organic nappy cream on her next trip back, I knew it was time to stop reading.

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But this aside, the spreadsheet was worth wading through just to see in one place everything that my friends found vital for labour, birth and the early days, as well as recommendations of specific items and brands.

Of course, it didn’t work out absolutely perfectly. The point of the list is that it’s each person’s own experience and opinion. Babies – and mums – are all different. As a result, there are things that the spreadsheet promised I would need in the first weeks that we haven’t even broken out of the packaging yet, and Honor is over four months old. Likewise, there are things that it told us to steer clear of, that we’ve subsequently gone and bought.

There was great fuss made over change bags, with several being recommended and debated over, with criteria including bottle capacity, handy compartments for clean/dirty clothes and how easily they hung on pushchair handles. But when I came to buy one, I simply couldn’t find one I liked the look of. Okay, so the style of it probably shouldn’t be the primary concern, but many of these bags carry higher-than-high-street price tags and so I feel that expecting it to look good shouldn’t be too much to ask. As such, I didn’t buy one – instead I chose to use a big tote I already owned. It might not have special compartments designed specifically for my baby’s every need, but it has done us just fine.

Meanwhile, we originally followed the advice not to buy a sling. There’s a lot of debate raging on about slings at the moment, probably more so in the US than the UK still, but there’s a definite camp who frown upon them (or at least some designs) for various reasons, from safety to joint pressure.

But we ended up buying one, simply because Honor cried a lot in the early days and only stopped when she was being held. After a few weeks of trying to get by doing everything with one hand, we bought a sling, and never looked back. Honor would sleep for hours with her head nestled next to our heartbeat – while we got on with daily life two-handed.

So although it wasn’t technically definitive for us, the Definitive Baby Shopping List was a brilliant start. Without it, I dread to think how many more needless expensive purchases we could have made, and how many little gems would have passed us by - including that turkey-baster nose cleaner.