The Right Way to Shop for Baby Shower Gifts
There's a Right and a Wrong Way to Give Baby Shower Gifts
Oh the joy of giving baby shower gifts! You open the envelope, and pull out the card that is decorated with pastel baby rattles and crib shoes. Tentatively, you open the card, and your suspicions have been confirmed: you have been invited to another baby shower!
Kids Cost
The birth of a child is a joyous occasion, but an expensive proposition for the parents-to-be. Yes, it may be a bit presumptuous to plan baby showers and expect gifts, but the reality is that showers are thrown for almost every major life-changing event (weddings, the birth of a child, etc.), both as a celebration and with the hope that guests will bring a thoughtful gift.
Start With The Registry
It may be tempting to simply peruse the aisles at your local stores and fill your cart with dozens of adorable infant outfits, but if you really want your gift to be useful and used, go to the registry that the parents have established.
Every newborn is showered with an endless supply of cute clothes. Many of them will be outgrown before the tags have even been removed, simply because there are too many outfits and the parents are too exhausted to create a rotational system to ensure that they are all worn.
The old standbys will be used the most - onesies, sleepers, etc - as will a variety of other must-haves for newborns. If you simply must include an adorable outfit (or two), make sure that you also give the parents something from the registry that they are sure to need and use.
Consider Your Parenting Must-Haves
Every parent survives the infancy of their children with the help of a few understated items that a parent-to-be is not likely to consider.
An example -- most new parents design the nursery, including the bedding, and think that they will need one, maybe two, crib sheets. Seasoned parents know that this is not reasonable, that sheet-changes in the middle of the night will quickly exhaust such a limited supply.
One tactic may be to have several sheets on the bed at one time, layered with waterproof pads, such that if a mess warrants a quick change of the sheets, the exhausted parents only have to remove the top sheet and underlying waterproof pad, revealing the next, clean sheet, and deal with the rest of the mess in the morning.
These types of tricks of the parenting trade are something that you can only learn by experience...but feel free to pass on your experience to the uninitiated set of parents. And that experience may be one of the best baby shower gifts of all!