u/DiligentMemory27

I’m 10 weeks pregnant with our first baby and struggling so much with food.

Part of how we normally maintain a low grocery budget is by me spending a lot of time on grocery/meal planning and prep. For example I compare prices at different stores before shopping, plan meal ideas based on what’s in the pantry, and I spent a lot of time preparing meals and baking things like bread to save us money. Now that I’m pregnant I’m so exhausted I’ve found myself struggling to plan and cook and relying a lot on expensive convenience foods.

My husband is doing his best but he works more hours/week than I do and he is ok at putting together some basic meals, but I can only eat so much rice + tofu with broccoli + roasted yams, which is the main meal he cooks over and over again. I need some suggestions of other easy and quick meals that he could figure out quickly or that I can do when all I want to do is sleep.

I’m a first time pregnant mom in Alberta, Canada (for context). My maternal family is very frugal and very much practices anti consumption in many respects (they’re Dutch immigrants lol) so there are lots of “anti consumption” ways of living that have always been normal to me. For example: we have always thrifted clothing by default; my mom, aunt, and grandmother all used cloth diapers, in fact my mom bought hers secondhand and some of them were passed along to my aunt. Things like hand me down furniture has always been the norm, my sister and I grew up with a set of solid wood bunk beds and a matching dresser that had belonged to an older cousin. Other things like saving bread bags and yogurt containers to reuse or cutting up old sheets and t shirts to use as rags. One of my grandmothers weekly practices is going to her local food rescue group to collect the bruised apples people don’t want and she cuts the icky parts out and uses the rest of make applesauce which is stored in the aforementioned old yogurt containers (slay queen, honestly).

As an adult with strong environmentalist and social justice values I’ve become even more invested in this way of life and view it as a financial, ethical and moral stance. Now that I’m expecting, I’m absolutely shocked and floored by the extent of pro-consumer mom and baby discourse and I guess the normalization of spending heaps of money on new items for babies. I mention my family because I realize that my family norms differ from what is the norm for many North Americans but I’m finding that preparing for baby is making me realize just how unusual (???) it seems this approach to life is.

For example, it seems obvious to me that buying baby clothes new is silly, babies grow so fast and every thrift store I’ve ever been in has heaps for baby clothes for super cheap. I was talking to a pregnant colleague yesterday who is a bit further along than I am (due about 1 month earlier) and she was telling me how she and her husband have been already buying baby clothes at Carter’s. I know that this is probably a cultural norm but hearing that just seemed totally insane to me lol. I had already decided to ask for a gift certificate for a baby/child consignment store on my registry and ask people to please not buy us any new clothes.

Also, I’ve been having suggestions for lots of baby and parenting subreddits and the number of discussions about which expensive equipment to buy is also mind boggling. Like, I saw a whole thread recently about how a $1500 rocking chair is absolutely essential. There were dozens of comments agreeing that it was not only a reasonable purchase but a necessary one.

Obviously since I don’t have a kid yet I have some level of naivety about this stuff, but I was chatting to my mom about it (she’s 56) and she was laughing about the rocking chair, saying that she just used an old rocking chair she got at an antique store for breastfeeding and it was fine. My aunt told me she used a popular chair from a Swedish brand that she got secondhand. They both agreed that having a special breastfeeding chair never even occurred to them.

I guess I just feel sort of mind boggled by how many people are truly convinced that they need to amass collections of new expensive items and they’re all essential, not optional or luxuries.

I saw another thread recently asking for recommendations for the best dresser to buy to use for baby’s clothes and the person was comfortable spending a few hundred dollars. I was like??? Go on fb and you will see dozens of dressers for sale for $30. How special does a dresser really need to be.

I’ve even been surprised that some friends of mine who I think of as having similar values (who don’t have kids) thought it was “so brave” of me to plan for cloth diapers. My friend, a self proclaimed environmentalist and anti capitalist said “wow that’s really intense” when I said that I was planning cloth. I think I responded by saying that cloth was the only option for most of human history and most of that time we did not have the luxury of washing machines 🤷‍♀️

Anyway, this stuff is wild. I’m already scared of people buying me a bunch of crap I don’t want.

I have a long term friend who is near and dear to me who did not receive any routine childhood vaccinations (dtap, hib, chickenpox, MMR, etc.), as an adult she has received some covid and flu vaccines.
I live in Alberta, Canada where there have been several measles outbreaks over the last few years. Additionally, my friend works in a public facing job as a restaurant manager in a busy tourist community, so presumably has a fairly high likelihood of being exposed to various communicable illnesses as she is always interacting with the public including people who have been travelling domestically and internationally.

There have been a few times in our adult lives that my friend has expressed interest in getting the immunizations that she didn’t receive in childhood. She’s never indicated being an ideological anti vaxxer. She didn’t have a family physician and I told her about a clinic that was accepting new patients to try to help her. For a period of time I was working in a public health clinic, and I even asked one of the nurses about the process for an adult (late 20s) to get childhood vaccines. The nurses provided me with a document that outlined the (very straightforward) process which I passed on to my friend. My impression had been that she hasn’t gotten them as an adult because she doesn’t know where to start or how to go about it, not because she doesn’t want to, but despite me trying to help her organize this and her saying she wants to get them she hasn’t followed through.

Now I’m expecting my first baby in December 2026, obviously winter is already prime cold/flu/sickness season. I plan to continue to get all recommended immunizations as I have for my entire life. This friend of mine is the only person who I feel nervous about being around baby, specifically because there have been so many incidents of measles in Alberta recently and she’s in a public facing job. I want to be kind and encouraging and not shame her but I’m not sure how to approach the conversation. How have you approached these kinds of situations?

I don’t know if it’s fair or realistic or even possible for me to ask her to please get ALL recommended immunizations that she’s missing over the next 7 months, or if some are more important than others (MMR bc there have been outbreaks?), or if asking her to wear an N95 and wash hands and don’t come by if symptomatic is enough.

I’m a first time mom in my first trimester! I was lucky to grow up in a cloth diapering family so it’s normal to me and I plan to do it from the get go. I was gifted a big box of what I believe are all in one/all in two diapers (with the covers/main diaper and the inserts). I also recently found some apple cheeks and giggle life diapers without inserts for sale for super cheap on marketplace. The thing is that for health/environmental reasons I want to avoid synthetic materials direct on baby’s skin, and the ones I was given for free don’t have fabric tags but feel like a fleecey polyester blend on the inside of the diaper plus the inserts. Whatever they are I am very confidential it’s not a natural material. Has anyone here used the outside or main part of an all in 1 diaper as a cover over a flat or prefold? Since flats and prefolds are so cheap but waterproof covers are $$$ new I was thinking this way I could use the ones I was gifted for free while ensuring only cotton/flannel/muslin is direct on baby’s genitals. Does this make any sense at all?

When my mom cloth diapered in the 90’s she used prefolds with pins and very simple plastic pull on covers, my grandmother used flats and plastic covers in the 60’s/70’s. From talking to them it seemed easier then when there were less options to choose from lol! My mom was horrified when I told her that the fancy all in one diapers seem to have polyester blend on the inside.

I’m a first time mom early in my pregnancy. My husband and I intend to do some version of bed sharing or cosleeping from birth and are considering different options/configurations. My mom bed shared with my sister and I (definitely did not follow safe sleep 7), and she told me that if she’d known she could buy or build a side-car style thing (either the drop side bassinet or a DIY version like the ikea sniglar hack) she would have loved that. I told her we were planning a floor bed and she encouraged me to consider a side car since she feels it would have been helpful to her. My husband occasionally has sleep struggles and we have mused that having baby in bed with us could exacerbate his sleep challenges if he feels any anxiety about squishing baby. We plan to buy a queen futon mattress (9 layer cotton and eucalyptus from east west futons), which will be on the floor with slats underneath for ventilation. I’ve wondered if it would make sense to do the ikea sniglar side car hack with the floor futon, as the sniglar’s lowest setting is low enough to the ground that I think it would be very close to level with the height of the mattress. Presumably we would find a way to tether the sniglar to the bed slats to ensure no gaps.

To me, this would give us the option of sidecar or bed sharing depending on how we end up feeling and our comfort level and circumstances. Also if for some reason there is a medical contraindication with bed sharing such as prematurity, then the sidecar would be a safer option that’s still closer than a traditional bassinet or crib.

I see the sniglars used on marketplace all the time so I know we could get one for cheap, plus I imagine it could be convenient to have the crib/toddler bed option if at some point we decided to cease co sleeping or for transitioning toddler to their own bed.

Fortunately we have two bedrooms so I have floated to him that if sleeping with baby is too hard on his sleep he may need to sleep on his own in the other room, but he wants to be present to help me with breastfeeding, night time diaper changes, etc. and doesn’t like the idea of being a dad who snoozes through all the night time work (bless his feminist heart lol). I have pointed out that he will have different day time responsibilities than me with his work and school which may make sleeping in different rooms a necessity since it will be hard to show up in court on no or little sleep day after day.

Does this sidecar floor bed idea even make any sense? Has anyone done something similar?