The Carraway Seed

Careful examination of our blog, combined with an equally careful study of the weather, might indicate two things to our astute readers. First, we’re having a baby. Second, it’s almost christmastime. What with the holiday(s), and the whole first-baby thing, and our families and friends being generous people, some of you are probably going to end up getting us gifts for the baby somewhere along in here. It’s been very gratifying how enthusiastic many of you are, and the little ways in which this has felt like a group experience, or at least like a spectator sport with a generous bunch of fans for home games. We hate to temper the pleasure of your generosity by putting up a bunch of greedy terms and conditions, or trying to ringlead the whole thing. But it’ll probably come out better for all concerned if we make a few requests, at least.

1. Beth’s allergic to a bunch of things (yes, even some things that aren’t wheat derivatives.) That includes clothing made with acrylic fibers, and wool from sheep, goats and rabbits at least (for safety, just assume all animal hair.) Unfortunately, that means two things:
   1. First, there’s some chance that the baby will have those allergies too; we won’t know until after it’s born, either because it’s been itching and crying for days, or because it’s been suffering stoically but has swollen up to a large red sphere.
   2. Second, even if the baby isn’t allergic, Beth still is, which would give her trouble handling the baby when it’s happily swathed in clothing/blankets/etc made of them. Beth’s inability to handle the baby would thus leave me in charge of our child’s first few years, with Beth attempting to be loving and nurturing from across the room (which in the case of breastfeeding would be a fine spectator event in itself, but would be costly in terms of laundry soap and carpet cleaning.)

   For what it’s worth, we’re not aware of other textile allergies anywhere in the mix. Cotton is a safe choice, as are polyester, rayon, nylon, bamboo fiber and so forth. The polyester-derived “fleece” used as an insulating layer in most clothing is fine too (fortunately, because it turns up in everything). Our strenuous apologies to anyone who was trying to knit us something — we meant to write this a month ago. Hopefully any knitters have been procrastinating at least as much as we have, and have ready access to cotton/bamboo/soy/whatever yarn.

2. Excepting the allergy issue above, used and hand-me-down stuff is perfectly fine, and indeed preferable. Kids outgrow clothing awfully fast, and we’ve got a delightful period at the onset where they haven’t learned to reject all our tastes in clothing, when we can pretty much dress the Seed in most anything. Yes, baby clothing is adorable (at least when it’s got your baby in it.) We don’t want to dissuade you if you see something you’d really like to see the Seed wearing, but other factors being equal, please help us stick it to the petroleum giants and retail magnates by favoring used things when they’re available. The ecological impact of raising kids is already bad enough.
3. Speaking of petroleum giants, we’re trying to avoid the worst of the chemical exposures, and brominated flame retardants are high on the list. Given the choice, please opt for stuff that doesn’t claim to be flame retardant. Flame retardants are mostly found in normally flammable plastic derivatives (such as acrylics), many of which Beth is allergic to anyway — so it’s not all bad.
4. We’re planning to use cloth diapers and a diaper service here in the city — if you’d like to get us a gift certificate towards those costs, this is the service we plan to use (the gift option is a little buried, but it’s in there.)
5. We don’t know the gender of the baby, nor are we planning to find out before it arrives. Even if we did, though, we’d probably tend towards gender-neutral stuff — the whole pink and blue thing is kind of silly. We’re planning on using mostly green for the baby’s room, but clothing could be most any color. Bright colors are good — this business with the pastel shades seems to be a contrivance more for the benefit of adults than children, especially since infants can’t see color very clearly anyway.
6. No slings/carriers, please — we’d like to buy these ourselves. It’s like buying shoes — very body (and baby) specific, and anyway our local retailers already earned some business.
7. We made an Amazon wishlist of some things we figured we’d need. It’s incomplete — Amazon turns out to be a lousy place to shop for baby stuff when you don’t know exactly what you’re after. And we’re still adding to it. But help yourselves if it’s helpful to you.

Finally, Beth put together a list of some secondhand baby stores (after the cut), since many of you are either as new of this as we are, or else haven’t done it in a while.

Thanks for your forbearance. And your generosity. :)

San Francisco

Chloe’s Closet
451 Cortland Ave (between Andover St & Wool St)
San Francisco
(415) 642-3300

Peek-A-Bootique
1306 Castro Street (between 24th St & Jersey St)
San Francisco
(415) 641-6192

Marin

Outgrown
1417 4th St
San Rafael
(415) 457-2219

Sonoma County

Baby Discount
6826 Sebastopol Drive, Sebastopol. (707) 829-8851.
368 Petaluma Blvd., Petaluma. (707) 763-8852.

Wee Three
1007 W College Ave Ste A
Santa Rosa
(707) 525-9333

Sprout
177 Healdsburg Ave.
Healdsburg
707-433-7355