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| Why Dads Don't Buy Baby Clothes |
They may have loads of money, or they have weighed up the options and decided it is worth renting out their orifices in order to pay for it. But it is a choice; it is not strictly necessary. When our daughter was born my friend Esther gave us a black bin liner full of baby clothes. 'What do we need with 38 vests?' said my girlfriend, with a broad grin, as she piled them up neatly. But not all of them were for newborns, and we used every one in the end. And then we passed them on to someone else.
The beauty of this is that most children's clothes are often of very good quality; they have to be, in order to persuade mad parents to pay that amount of money for them. It is quite possible to leave a baby clothes emporium with a handful of small bags that between them have cost £75, £100, name your price.
Obviously, it's lovely to have a few new clothes - but that is where presents come in. With luck your indulgent relatives will buy several minuscule outfits for Junior. With more luck they will buy outfits to fit him/her in six or nine months' time, when you are really feeling the pinch. And with most luck they will buy practical clothes - vests, babygros, cardigans, blankets, hats, coats, woolly booties. As opposed to expensive but essentially useless items - party dresses, crop tops, trainers, cufflinks, three piece suits, anything that needs handwashing or anything with lots of buttons.
A quick note on poppers. You may have noticed over the years that most children's clothes are covered with poppers, and you may have assumed that these would be both fiddly and annoying. Absolutely not. Poppers are a glorious and magnificent invention, utterly unconnected to the political philosopher Karl Popper (1902-94), which I always thought was a shame.
Most vests and babygros (a.k.a. 'romper suits') have poppers so positioned that you have almost instant access to the nappy area, allowing you to remove a humdinger of a turd before your eyes begin to water and your nasal passages inflame. If there were buttons where poppers should be, you'd be swearing and shouting, the baby would be crying, and before long Social Services would be at the door taking your child away forever. Italian clothes, for some reason, often come with buttons rather than poppers, which explains a great deal.
Oh, and zips are good too. We like zips. (Except when they catch.)
If indulgent friends and relatives don't buy you clothes for the baby, they will probably give you a soft toy. Before you became a dad, when you went into the houses of people with small children, you probably noticed that they all had 300,000 soft toys. And you thought, what spoilt little bastards, and what pitifully indulgent parents. And again you were wrong. More likely than not, every one of those soft toys was a present from someone. Parents rarely buy them. They don't need to. It's the default present for small children when your imagination fails you, much as candles are for grown-ups.
Mothwallets know all of these things, and they usually keep quiet about them, for fear of being revealed as mothwallets. Here are the Fundamental Laws of Mothwallet, and clever parents should memorize them all.
First Law: Try and get as much as you can free. Some parents will be gagging to give away their old stuff. Cultivate them. If necessary, throw yourselves on their mercy.
Second Law: If buying second-hand, the rules are the same as for cars: you are almost certain to be ripped off. For all you know, that bargain pushchair may have been welded together from two unconnected halves of pushchair. And don't bother kicking the wheels. They saw you coming, my son.
Third Law: Never buy soft toys. Especially pink ones. To find out more, you can check out Why Dads Don't Buy Baby Clothes.