Top Ten Baby Things That You Do Not Need

The future parent is such a soft target for the multi million pound baby-stuff industry: so clueless, yet so eager to do the best for their baby. But I am sure of this: buying lots of stuff for your baby does not equate to being a good parent. And here are the top ten things that I wish I had not wasted the Earth's resources on:

1. Scratch mitts

Before Cave Baby's birth I had no idea why you needed these, but I bought some anyway because it seemed like the thing to do (see also: baby hats). After Cave Baby's birth I still had no idea what they were for but I kept them in the drawer in case it dawned upon me one day. Now they have been given away to charity I still have not managed to figure out the point of these things. Do some babies scratch themselves a lot? Don't they just work the gloves off their hands? Can't you just trim their nails so they are too short to cause any damage? I don't get it.

2. Night nursing bras

The books tell you that you MUST wear a bra AT ALL TIMES following birth or your breasts will drop to the floor and never return. Well, they may drop to the floor and never return but a night bra isn't going to make much difference. I wore a night bra with breastpads for a couple of weeks after giving birth and can say that: (i) the breast pads usually fell out and I inevitably forgot to replace them after a feed anyway; and (ii) half the time my breasts fell out as well, nicking the delicate nipples on the elastic at the edge of the cup as they did so. In conclusion, a night bra is less than useless. Put a towel under you to catch milk instead.

3. Baby lotion

What is baby lotion for? I always assumed it was to moisturise the baby. But then my dad told me that they used to use it to clean my bottom when I was a baby. And I noticed that there were a million other products on the market that you were supposed to use to moisturise your baby. Is this a genuine mystery or am I just clueless?

4. Infacol/Gripe water

In my humble opinion, these preparations are nothing but cleverly marketed pharmaceutical quackery. We were told by the midwives at our antenatal classes that Infacol would be essential for those first few difficult nights. I duly went out and bought some before Cave Baby even arrived. Sure enough, she was inconsolable in the evening of her second day so we tried dosing her with Infacol. Did it make any difference? No. After using it for a couple of days I suddenly had a moment of clarity and wondered what the heck was I doing shoving bizarre white orange flavoured gloop down my precious newborn's neck. And I put her next to me in bed. Final score: co-sleeping 1, Infacol 0.

5. Baby hats

In my pregnant ignorance I bought a baby hat because it seemed to be what you were supposed to do. And Cave Baby did wear this hat during her first couple of days when she slept all alone in a moses basket. Then I read that you weren't meant to put hats on babies' heads indoors, and I got all confused. Meanwhile, almost every relation of ours bought Cave Baby a little cotton hat. Now I am not a hat person myself but even if I loved hats I don't think I would need twelve different ones, all in slightly different pink flowery designs. As soon as she was given a beautiful knitted pink bonnet I forgot about the naff cotton baby hats and used the knitted hat for the next six months.

6. Other baby toiletries

Baby bubble bath, baby bath oil, baby shampoo, baby talc, baby oil, baby lotion, baby cream etc etc. Since when did tiny babies get dirty enough to requite this kind of industrial cleaning? This might be just me, but I find that my baby spends the majority of her time inside clean clothes, in a clean house, with very little opportunity for dirt transference on or off her squishy pink body. I see no requirement to strip her body of its natural moisturising oils and replace them with nice smelling fake ones. Until she starts crawling around the garden and getting properly dirty, I will stick to cleaning her with plain water and plain water alone.

7. Thousands of breast pads

I believed the Mothercare catalogue. It said that in your first week after birth you would require 100 breast pads. 100! A bit of elementary arithmetic breaks that down to 14.29 a day! Or, 7.14 per breast per day, assuming you have two breasts. That is a lot of changes of breast pads. I only used about three per breast per day even in the early days before my milk flow had equalised to Cave Baby's needs. Am I lucky not to leak too much, or am I just really dirty? Maybe if you are bottle feeding you need this many to absorb the unused milk, but if that is the case then Mothercare should really state that in their advice in the catalogue. Here is my advice - buy one packet of disposable breast pads to use in the early weeks, then move on to washable ones which are much prettier, and don't resemble a sanitary towel quite so much.

8. Bibs in newborn size

What I cannot grasp about bibs is why bottle fed babies need them but breast fed babies don't. I didn't buy any bibs before Cave Baby was born but we were given tons of them. Most could be kept for when she began eating solids, but some were newborn size with a very small neck hole. So, hating to leave anything unused, I thought maybe I could use one to stop the newborn Cave Baby covering her clothes in sick. But then I ran into two difficulties: (i) it was impossible to predict when she would be sick, so she would basically have to wear a bib all the time; and (ii) when she was sick, it just ran down the bib and soaked into her clothes anyway. This was not a very successful experiment and the bibs were soon consigned to the charity pile.

9. Cotton buds

You know, the little plastic sticks with a swirl of cotton wool on each end? I know they are useful for putting on make up and taking off nail varnish. But what is their application as far as a baby is concerned? What part of a baby's body is too small to admit a normal sized ball of cotton wool but robust enough to withstand an invasion by one of these mini pugel sticks?

10. Breast shells

What a great idea. Shaped plastic cups that sit on your breasts, with a little hole for your nipples, catching any milky leakage for you to feed to your baby on a later occasion. There is only one problem. How the heck do you fit your ample breastfeeding bosom and a pair of these inside your bra? And how comically large will your chest look if you do manage to fit everything in? The mind boggles.

So glad I've got this off my chest! Have I missed anything?