Necessary Items For Newborn Baby

The real cost of childhood can be very much lower. And there are what economists call opportunity costs to bring into the equation. If you are staying at home for 15 or 20 years looking after children instead of going out and whooping it up at costly nightspots, you could save a lot of money. Good grief, if you cut down on taxis, sport and holidays you might even clear a profit. You will be fat and miserable, but you won't necessarily be poor.

Necessary Items For Newborn Baby

Even so, the entry fee is high. There is a lot of stuff you need to have, and soon. The sheer quantity of infant-related paraphernalia takes the breath away, especially when you are carrying it all. Before Arbuthnot or Iolanthe have issued their first meconium poo, you will need to at least think about acquiring all of the following: 

1. Somewhere for baby to sleep. Most of the books recommend buying a Moses basket. This is a conveniently baby-shaped basket which comes with a sheet lining and has handles so you can carry it from room to room. Baby can sleep there during the day and during the night as well. Only problem: with a wooden stand thrown in, Moses baskets cost about £50. A ridiculous expense for a piece of equipment you won't need in a couple of months. Does anyone you know have one lying around the house? That they would be only too happy to lend or give you at no cost to you at all?

2. A pushchair or pram. It's said that no one pushes prams any more, other than the very rich, who know a status symbol when they see one. But I'm not sure about this. I suspect some new parents buy prams because they think that's what you are supposed to buy, not realizing that within two or three months they won't need it any more for anything. Most parenthood books now warn you away from prams, because they are so expensive, and because they are awkward: it's marginally easier to swim the English Channel than get a pram on a bus.

Nonetheless, tiny babies do like a pram. Its flat surface is more comfortable, which means Junior is more likely to fall asleep and less likely to cry, both of which are good. So you have a few options. You could forget the pram entirely and go straight for the pushchair. Brutal, but cost effective. Or you could buy one of those pram-cum-pushchair convertibles, which are fun to tinker with, although like sofa beds, never quite as comfortable as the salesman will have you believe. 

Or you can find someone else who has bought a pram and doesn't need it any more. They will be desperate to get rid of it, because it takes up so much space. Offer to take it off their hands, and worry about pushchairs later.

3. Nappies. A newborn baby needs its nappy changed up to 60 times a week. In the past, scary-sounding 'terry' nappies were the only option: you could use them again and again but your entire supply of them had to be boiled clean twice a day. Thanks to Pampers, Huggies and the like, this is no longer necessary.

Unfortunately the disposable nappies create problems of their own. One is their expense: quite simply, they cost more than you ever imagined possible. Then there is their effect on the environment. This may not be an issue you care about greatly, but there's no avoiding the simple, horrendous truth: that by the end of the century, shit- and piss-filled nappies will occupy landfill sites the size of Belgium. And that's just the ones the Belgians have used, so you can imagine how badly off the rest of us are. But the manufacturers know that we are all now too lazy and soft to go back to 'terry' nappies. Disposables will probably be your single greatest expense in the first two years (More on this later.) 

4. Changing mat. This is just a plastic, padded rectangle with either Winnie the Pooh or Mickey Mouse plastered all over it, just as shit will be quite soon. It may not look much but this will save your furniture and carpets and maybe your sanity into the bargain. An essential purchase.

5. Muslins. You can't have too many of these either. They are cloth squares, about the size of large handkerchiefs, and you will use them for mopping up all kinds of stuff (let's not worry about the details just yet). 'Muslin' is another word you never used, or even heard, before parenthood. Now, whenever you hear anyone mention muslins, you will know that they too are members of the club.
 
6. A car seat. Essential if you drive, as it's illegal to transport a small baby in a car without one. They are removable, which is helpful if baby drops off, as you can then carry it around as it sleeps. Again there is no need to buy this if you can get it for free.

Someone you know will have a car seat they no longer need. Taking it off their hands will only do them a favour. (Children usually graduate to a bigger car seat when they are about a year old. Don't be shy about asking parents of one-year-olds if they need their old car seat. They will already be trying to blag a booster seat from someone else.) To find out more, you can check out Necessary Items For Newborn Baby.

Average Cost Of Raising A Child Per Year

A lot of this is obviously to do with class and geography - there will be areas of the country where Tim is a more manageable name than Kevin, and vice versa. Americans complicate name unnecessarily by insisting that Robin is a girl's name, and by not knowing that Chelsea is a football team. Do not be distracted. With luck and deep thought you may yet think of a name that isn't too ridiculous and hasn't been nabbed by someone else. Only recently, a friend told me with pride that his newborn nephew was going to be called Monty. It was the pride of a man who knew that there was no glut of Montys, that there might indeed be a shortage of Montys, even an absence of Montys. My daughter told him there was one in her class. His face fell with a clump.
 

Average Cost Of Raising A Child Per Year

But remember this. As you edge towards making your minds up, be aware that this child will carry its name for life, and will therefore be identified and even judged by these syllables that you will have decided on in only a couple of days when both of you were exhausted and slightly mad. Put it this way: Arbuthnot and Iolanthe might seem like a good idea right now, but they never will again, until the end of time.

Stuff 

IVAN: Nothing prepares you for the complete seismic change in your life that occurs when your child is born. Oh, it'll be wonderful. You don't think about it too much. And then suddenly you start seeing the money going out of your account on prams and pushchairs and all the rest of it. I remember that W cost us a thousand pounds before he was even born, and that was just on baby clothes and ridiculous prams and pushchairs. The pram I think we used three times before it was sold on, at some boot sale or something. Silver Cross pram. The most ridiculous piece of machinery ever invented. And things like baby chairs for cars and stuff. It's an expensive business.

Before baby, your home probably felt quite comfortably sized, with room enough for most of the things and people you wished to fit into it. After baby, Blenheim Palace would seem cramped. As you bring home mother-and-baby for the first time - they come as a package now - you will realize not only how little space you now have for them, but how little you will have for all the stuff you are going to have to buy in the coming days, months and years. Stuff. It's only a little word. In the old days it meant nice things, like cameras and hi-fi equipment and cars and enormous TVs. Anything that needed batteries. Anything that could be plugged in. And absolutely anything that came with a remote control. 

But now you are a father, and you are looking at a different kind of stuff. You can still buy all that electrical equipment, if you are a multimillionaire and you tell your partner you inherited it from a recently deceased aunt who had worked at Dixons. Otherwise your shopping hours will now be dedicated to the purchase of stuff for your baby. This, as everyone knows, costs a fortune. 

It is frequently suggested in newspapers, which have usually got the figure from other newspapers, that the cost of looking after a child from 0 to 18 years is upwards of £250,000. Or, if you choose the special bargain rate, four kids for a million. We'll throw in the first nappy for free. Can't say fairer than that, can we?
 

New fathers whose chests started palpitating towards the end of the last paragraph and have since been rushed to hospital will therefore not find out that this £250,000 figure seems to have been chosen completely at random. (When broken down into constituent expenses it often includes such necessities as twelve years of independent schooling and a new car on Junior's seventeenth birthday.) To find out more, you can check out Average Cost Of Raising A Child Per Year.

Funny Baby Names List

In 2002, 66 newborn babies were named Chardonnay. That includes 14 whose parents spelled it with only one 'n'. None of these parents seem to have worked out that the name was given to a character in "Footballers' Wives' as a JOKE. Maybe the trend will spread, and small boys will soon be named Merlot, or Pinot Noir.
 

Funny Baby Names List

Celebrities, as so often, are the true culprits. When Bob Geldof and Paula Yates called their children Pixie, Fifi Trixibelle and Peaches in the 1980s, everyone laughed. Now they would probably be praised for their restraint. It's hard enough for children of successful parents to make their own way in the world, without being named after soft fruit or household pets. And yet celebrities continue to give their children the silliest names.

They get their revenge in the end. Keith Richards's daughter was christened Dandelion, and now calls herself Angela. David Bowie's son was christened Zowie and now calls himself Joe. What they call their fathers is anyone's guess.
 
How much simpler it used to be, and not just in the UK. Until 1970 the names of French children had to be chosen from an approved list issued by the Ministry of the lnterior. Jean-Paul or Jean-Luc - no problem. But Paul-Jean or Luc-Jean - forget it. Foreign names were a particular norm. It's pleasing to think that, somewhere in the dark and forgotten recesses of the French penal system, there may still be men-and women chained to walls who once dared to call their children Mario or Dave.
 
So, what you do call your little precious? Pocket-sized paperbacks of Babies' Names will offer several hundred to choose from, but once you have discounted the ones that sound ridiculous, the ones everyone else seems to have, the ones you can't use because you have always hated someone with that name, the annoying Irish ones no one knows how to spell, the ones that recall previous boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives, the ones that sound poncy or namby or thuggish or dim, the ones so out of fashion no one will ever use them again, and Dave, that doesn't leave an awful lot. 

Indeed, if you can stretch to a short list of six you will be doing well. Some parents just end up with 'Emily', remember they have a boy, and have to start again from scratch.

The crucial thing, as you compile your shortlist, is that the name should pass the Playground Test. In two or three years' time you will be in a playground with your infant, who won't be doing what it's told. And you will have to shout, 'Aurora, stop doing that!' And people will snigger snigger or snort. One or two will have coughing fits. Aurora is one of several names that fail the Playground Test. So do Nigella, LaToya and Arundhati (if you're Scottish). For boys, try and avoid Rock, Clarence, Reginald and Speck Wildhorse. For fear of offending too many readers, I shall go no further, but you know what I am talking about.

More problematic, I'm afraid, are the vagaries of fashion. Names drift in and out, dulled by familiarity and then rediscovered by new generations of desperate parents. I have known an awful lot of Simons and Stephens and Saraha and Lucys in my life - of these, only Lucy still seems to have any currency. A few years ago, in my sheltered comer of north London, there was a sudden surge of Felixes. Oliver has been and gone and come back, and may have gone again, for all I know. There are truckloads of Finlays, and more Phoebes than can ever have been the plan. We know several Albies and Alfies, but no little Nigels. Are there any little Nigels? Anywhere? To find out more, you can check out Funny Baby Names List.

How To Choose Baby Names Based On Numerology

THE MATERNITY WARD 

If 'special care' isn't required, we move instead to the female stronghold that is the maternity ward. You thought you felt uncomfortable and out of place in the delivery room? Think again. Compared to the maternity ward, the delivery room was like an old man's pub just before closing time. Though at least partly responsible for making these bright new babies, the few males who pass through the swing doors are given filthy glares by nurses, mothers, grandmothers and all the other 793 unidentifiable female relatives of someone or other who are milling around slightly menacingly. 
 

How To Choose Baby Names Based On Numerology

As I understand it, it's because they think we are going to stay five minutes and then run away, whereas what they'd like us to do is hang around for four hours cooing at the baby, fetching people cups of tea and telling the female relatives how much weight they have lost. But, of course, we stay five minutes and then run away, because the atmosphere there is so intimidating. Another chicken-and-egg argument. Somewhere in all this, of course, are your partner and your baby, but they may both be too out of it to care.
 
40 or so years ago, when I was born, my mother stayed in hospital for three weeks convalescing, even though there was nothing wrong with her. Nowadays the shortage of maternity beds is so fierce, and the chances of catching superbugs so high, that in some hospitals they have barely delivered the baby before they are giving you directions to the bus stop. Twenty-four hours of in-hospital care is fairly standard, 48 hours a miraculous gift from a generous management. 

There's one obvious advantage to all this rush and bluster, which is that mother and baby will ingest the absolute minimum amount of hospital food. But the quick turnaround does place a lot of pressure on Exhausted New Dad. You may have had it in mind to go home and get 20 hours' sleep to make up for all the stresses of the past few days. In addition, you may have heard of the legend of Wetting The Baby's Head, which requires father to go to the pub with his friends who will buy him drinks for as long as he promises never to show them the video footage of the birth. 

Sleep, then drink; or drink, then sleep; either would be just about perfect. And both are impossible. The twenty-first-century hospital birth allows no time for anything. Before you can think of a good reason to object, you will be driving them back to the sty of your home, hoping that your partner, whose stitches may still be a bit tender, doesn't hemorrhage all over the back seat of the car. Don't laugh: I'm told the stains are impossible to get out.

Importance Of Being Ernest

They will ask you how much it weighs, whether the labour was long or short, how the mother is doing, does it have your eyes. And then, almost as an afterthought, they will ask the killer question. 'Have you thought of any name yet.?'
 
My, have you thought of some names yet.
 
While the baby is still born, most parents will give it a temporary name, which may or may not be a joke. Two good friends of mine threatened throughout their pregnancy to burden their forthcoming daughter with the name 'Yoda', partly to amuse their friends but mainly to annoy their parents. They called her something else in the end, of course. 

Even so, in my four-year-old's class at kindergarten, there was a Luke, there was an Obe (pronounced Obi) and there was a Lya (nearly pronounced Leia). I suggested changing our daughter's name to Grand Moff Tarkin to help her to fit in better. For strange things have happened to children's names over the past few years. Blame the parents of Kylie Minogue, of Beyonce Knowles, and of all those actors called Ethan. 

For a while I suspected that it was a London thing, and that elsewhere in the country parents were still calling their little ones sensible things like John and Susan. But no. Given the freedom to choose anything, parents have started to choose anything, whether it is a recognized name or not. To find out more, you can check out How To Choose Baby Names Based On Numerology.

Special Care To Keep Premature Babies Alive

WHAT IF YOUR BABY IS UGLY? 

There is a school of thought that would suggest that all babies are ugly. And it's true that a remarkable number look like Sir Winston Churchill in his later, dribblier years. Occasionally a couple will have a truly hideous baby. It's more likely if they look like gargoyles themselves, but even airbrushed celebrities have suffered this fate, for there is surprisingly little correlation between ugliness at birth and the more profound uglinesses of adulthood. 
 

Special Care To Keep Premature Babies Alive

Several outstandingly hideous babies I have known have become extremely presentable children - although it often goes wrong in adolescence, like so much else. Even the killer combination of weak chin and big flappy ears can sometimes be overcome, and not just by surgery.
 
But whether or not the baby is ugly doesn't matter that much. What really matters is whether or not you think it's ugly. Her friends and everybody's relatives will coo anyway. Your friends will want to keep away from it however gorgeous it is. The beauty or otherwise of your baby is your concern, and yours only. And I mean you, the father, because the mother will think it's the prettiest baby ever born even if it looks like John Prescott. She is programmed to believe this.
 
Whereas you will probably look down at your firstborn and think ... it's a baby. (You may be programmed to think this too. After all, biologically you have done your job, and as a healthy, active male of species homo sapiens you should now be looking for someone else to impregnate. Apparently, good looking midwives are always being hit upon by new dads, 'Like being chained to an idiot ...')

So don't worry if your baby is ugly. You will learn to love it. Or maybe not.
 
'SPECIAL CARE' 

Now there's a euphemism to chill the blood. Around ten per cent of newborns require "special care" after birth and are therefore shifted off to the Special Care Baby Unit. This includes premature babies (those born before 37 weeks) and babies weighing less than 5lb 8oz (whether premature or not), as well as babies who have picked up infections or struggled with breathing during birth. 

There's nothing wrong, in short, that can't be fixed with a short spell in an incubator, where baby can be monitored and fed intravenously and brought gently into the world. It's worth noting here that infant mortality these days is very low - down to six per 1,000 births. (Half of these are stillbirths.) 

In 1850, in England and Wales, around 150 of every 1,000 babies died within the first month - a figure that changed little over the following 50 years. Since then, though, the rate has consistently declined, apart from a brief blip during World War Two. In 1960 it was 20 per 1,000, so huge advances have been made even in the past few years. Bear in mind that around 70 of every 1,000 newborns weigh less than 5lb 8oz, which makes you realise that however tiny and underfed and plain unwell your little baby may look, pure probability is in your favour. 

40 years ago twelve per cent of low birth weight babies died in the first month. Now it's around four per cent. There are some babies who are never going to survive. But the vast majority of the rest will pull through. So if your baby is put in an incubator, the first thing is not to panic.
 
Naturally you will be worried. Possibly even bricking yourself with terror. After the ghastliness of the birth, an incubator may feel like the last straw. But be aware that for the mother it will be even worse. Miriam Stoppard in The New Parent says it's like losing a limb. The baby should be lying in its mother's arms, not under a plastic cover like an old sandwich. 

Rationally, you know that unless the baby is seriously ill, it probably will be lying in its mother"s arms within a few days, maybe sooner. But your considerable experience watching bad hospital dramas on TV still leads you to fear the worst. Try and forget all that. Be strong and Clint-like. And keep your angers crossed. To find out more, you can check out Special Care To Keep Premature Babies Alive.