Tool 06
What to buy,
and when
Fifty two things, sorted by the week to start looking rather than by category. Twenty of them are genuinely essential. The rest are convenience, and it is worth knowing which is which before somebody sells you a $400 bassinet.
Your week
Enter your date and this list sorts itself around you.
Until then it is in week order.
One email a week
The two or three things to order this week
Not a catalogue. The handful that go wrong when they arrive late.
The order that matters
The car seat is the only thing on this list you legally cannot go home without, so it goes first, around week 24. Buy it new. A used seat may have been in a crash you cannot see and the shell has an expiry date stamped on it.
Then anything with a delivery time: crib, mattress, stroller. Furniture is the category that quietly takes eight weeks and nobody finds out until week 34.
Then the boring consumables around week 32, and your own postpartum supplies at 34, which is the single most under-bought category on every registry ever written.
What you can skip
Newborn shoes. A wipe warmer. A changing table, if you have a chest of drawers and a changing pad. A full set of newborn clothes, since large babies skip the size entirely. A bottle steriliser, if you have a dishwasher and hot water. The nursery, honestly, for the first three months, since the baby will be in your room anyway.
Buy small first
Bottles, pacifiers and carriers all come down to preference, and the preference is the baby's, not yours. Buy one small set of two brands and let them choose. A dozen of the wrong bottle is a genuinely common and expensive mistake.