One of the biggest perks of preparing for a second baby, especially one who's the same gender as your oldest child, is being able to reuse the majority of things you already have.
As our daughter grew out of clothing, toys and gear, we put it all in storage, knowing that we would eventually try for another child. When we were expecting Ariana, we took in a lot of secondhand clothing and gear, and we saved much of it. The items we're getting ready to use again are past the secondhand stage and are probably third- and fourth-hand by now. I wrote this blog post back in 2018 about all the secondhand items we had for Ariana.
I think baby clothing, toys and gear is the best category that practices use-it-and-pass-it-down. Thrift shops, resale shops and nonprofits count on donations/sales to offer gently used goods. And the family/friend/social media community tremendously supports selling/trading/loaning goods. Baby and kid items certainly add up quickly when purchased brand new (even secondhand), and it only makes sense to reuse it multiple times when they only get used for a few months.
Over the past two and a half years, I managed to pare down some of the excess that we'd collected, and we've donated or sold a good amount of clothing and a few pieces of gear that just took up a lot of space. Luckily, we've been able to replace just about all the gear at no cost through friends passing things along or loaning things to us.
It's certainly a relief this time around to know that most of what we
need for a baby, we already have. I was about 33 or 34 weeks when we
picked up the bassinet from my friend, and it was a
huge sigh of relief to get it set up in the corner of our bedroom. The two baskets are also hand-me-downs and will be used to hold diapers/wipes and onesies/gowns/sleep sacks. I found another basket in storage that I'll reuse as a hamper.
One funny note about how pregnancy brain has been catching up to me: Over the past few weeks I've been getting the immediate items ready for Baby's arrival. I washed everything in the NB/0-3 month container and put some away in the nursery and some in a basket in our room. I've also got 95% of my hospital bag packed. One evening I was recalling a specific newborn-size onesie that I loved, and realized it wasn't in the drawer or basket with clothing. I was starting to wonder if I'd accidentally donated or sold it, until it dawned on me around 11:00 one night to check my hospital bag...where it was safely packed! (Pregnancy: when you can't remember a number of important things, but you get hung up on the whereabouts of one tiny onesie.)
New-to-us items that we've purchased secondhand, received as a hand-me-down or been loaned for our new baby:
- Double stroller
- Infant bathtub
- Bassinet for our room
- Infant clothing/shoes/additional sleep sacks
- Glass bottles
- Storage bags for pumped milk
- Mamaroo Rockaroo
When it comes to getting our home ready for our newest addition, I would have to say we are decidedly more laissez faire than we were when preparing for Ariana, haha. I insisted on having the nursery decorated and complete before she was born. Currently, we are planning to keep Ariana in the nursery while the baby will be sleeping in a bassinet in our room.
After a few months, we'll move Ariana into our bigger guest bedroom, aka her big girl room slash playroom, and the baby will move into the nursery. I'm not exactly in a rush to move Ariana into a real bed, but she tends to handle transitions better than I anticipate.
We've been making steady progress to update the room before Ariana moves in, from having the room painted, to hanging curtains, to putting up art and getting a new rug. We plan to update the bed frame so it's lighter and more feminine. We've repurposed art and other pieces from around the house, although we've bought a few new things to make the space fresh.
The nursery will more or less remain the same, which is certainly a weight off our shoulders. I love the design of the nursery as much as I did when we were putting it together, and didn't want to see it change. This blog post from 2018 details a lot of our eco-friendly items in the nursery, all of which we still use!
And so now, we soak up our time as a family of three and await the arrival of Baby Sister. Now that it's February, the countdown is officially on!
