Mini-Post Monday – God Bless Hand-me-downs

We are the young parents. Not many of our friends from HS have kids. We started “early” I guess. This concept kinda sucks sometimes. We have to find sitters to go out with those friends…or invite them to our toy infested abode. I had to go out looking for mommy friends.  But the one unforeseen advantage to this is hand-me-downs. I work(ed) with a lot of women with kids. Also? They all have 1 or 2 boys. We are overflowing with hand-me downs. Toys, clothes, leftover diapers, breast pads, maternity clothes…you name it. We have an entires set of shelves hanging form the ceiling in the garage that is just clothes.  I have to rotate toys, not only to entertain the kid, but because we have to make room!  We are so fortunate…we know. We have only bought a few articles of clothing since birth either because we hit some anomaly of not having something season wise or something was just too damn cute. O and we still have bins for years to come. I don’t think a week goes by that something isn’t dropped off in my office.  Football cleats, a bag of 4T jackets, a leap frog thingama-jig We just did the season change/go through all the goods for this age and were worried we wouldn’t have enough shorts…then I hit THAT bin. No joke, we have to have at least 50 pairs of shorts. Landon was pretty excited to see the ‘Momo’, ‘Choo Choo'(Thomas), and ‘Blue’ shirts in the mix.  Then I was getting other bins down and realized we missed a season!  There was a box of 18-24 month pants just sitting up there. ARG!  Good thing this kid has short stumpy legs…maybe they will still fit in the fall.

I sometimes lose perspective on this stuff.  This weekend I went to the Carter’s outlet because they were having a 1/2 off sale and we needed rash guards (an example of anomaly).  While I was there, I also picked up a few infant sets for some recently preggo friends.  HOLY FRACK that shiz is expensive!  And that was 1/2 off!  So it was then that I said, aloud to myself in the store, God bless hand me downs….