Parenting

Welcoming a Beautiful Baby Boy into our Busy Lives

Like I said in the very first post here, I wasn’t sure what the direction of this site would be. And to be honest, I’m still not really sure, but I know it’s not going to be just about the updates we have been making at our new home. So to balance that, as you can tell from the title this post is going to be about our amazing beautiful goofy son Jameson.

When my wife told me she was pregnant, I did not believe her at first. Whenever we talked about having kids we always had it planned out. My wife Bea lives to plan out everything. And this announcement was not in the plans, yet. Bea doesn’t know this, but as excited as I was that we were going to have a baby, you know after the initial shock wore off, I was equally just as scared. We just bought a house and spent most of our savings on furnishing that house, buying paint and other things to make it our own, and buying me a car. If you didn’t already know, I’m in the military and we don’t really get paid all that much money. Most of my “income” comes in the form of benefits, and after moving to the states I had lost some of those benefits. I didn’t know how expensive living in Las Vegas was actually going to be, and with Bea not working, then with Covid hitting, so couldn’t work, that meant we were going to have to live on just my paycheck.

I know we would be fine, but it was going to be tight. I also know that most people go through this same situation, or it’s even tighter for them. But life was never going to be the same. Just a few months prior we were living in Germany and traveling to a new European country every few months. Now we had a mortgage, lived in a new city, and we knew no one here. Bea was already starting to feel homesick for Germany, and then with Covid hitting, we wouldn’t be able to go back for Christmas as we talked about. Bea planned on getting a job once her green card came in, but now she decided she was going to stay home while pregnant. She had no friends yet and was just stuck at home, I felt so bad for her and wanted nothing more than to be able to take her back to her friends and family.

As the months went by, Bea was able to make friends with a group of local Germans, and we were slowly making progress on some of the home upgrades. But still, in the back of my mind, I was always thinking, how am I going to be able to afford all of the things we would need to welcome our new baby into our house. The baby room was coming along, and Bea was on the hunt for bargain furniture that we could repaint and make our own. We picked up a rocker for free off of Facebook, but it didn’t come with the cushions. And boy were those cushions expensive, like $200 expensive. So we were back on the hunt for another chair, we went to a few furniture stores to look for a new one, but they were all too expensive. And our savings was starting to go empty.

If you don’t have a kid yourself or have never shopped for baby stuff. Let me be the first to tell you, that shit is expensive. When we did our first registry at buybuy Baby, Bea and I spent over three hours in that store. And we left completely overwhelmed and with more questions than we had when we went to it. Like what are the absolute essentials that a baby needs, how many diapers do you need. And speaking of diapers, do you go with disposable ones or do you go with cloth diapers that are reusable and more cost-effective? Along the same lines, do you buy baby wipes, or do we use reusable wipes as well? What size onesies will a newborn babywear, what kind of onesies do you get? There are long sleeve ones, short sleeve ones, and then you have to decide if you want to try swaddling, or do we use a sleep sack? Then comes the baby shower, in the middle of a global pandemic, how do you have one, and how do you have one with people in multiple countries? My amazing mom organized a digital shower over zoom, which everyone all around the world could join.

Before the shower happened, I was on Amazon and ended up buying the stroller ourselves. That stroller was almost the same price as my first car. But it had the highest safety rated car seat and it could be used for several years. Because now that I was going to be a parent those types of things mattered way more than they ever had before. The not-so-smart part of that purchase is that I put it on a credit card that I had been trying to pay off for several years. But if you are in the market for a new stroller I can highly recommend the Uppababy Vista with the Mesa car seat. It can be easily maneuvered with one hand, and lifting the seat off of the stroller can be done with one push of a button.

After the virtual baby shower, a lot of the pressure to get stuff was lifted. We received a lot of the items we had asked for, and there wasn’t much left for us to get. His room was basically ready. We (Bea) decided we were going to try cloth diapers and reusable baby wipes. But for the first month, we ended up using disposable diapers since he couldn’t fit into the cloth ones yet. We still use disposable diapers at night, it’s not recommended to use the cloth overnight, they don’t hold as much for as long.

In the end though, once I held him for the first time all of that pressure and weight of do we have everything we need went away. I had a son, a beautiful perfect baby. And as new parents we knew we didn’t have everything we would need, people never do. At the end of the day, I know Jameson will need more stuff. And I know that we have many more years of being overwhelmed left, but no matter what our situation I will always provide my son with what he needs.