Baby, Where'd You Get Those Clothes?
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Homemaking on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 9:46 PM
Today my son wore ten different items of clothing.
(He’s nine months old. He’s messy.)
And just for curiosity’s sake I figured out how many of those items of clothing we’ve bought for him ourselves.
It’s one. One item - a onesie, to be specific - out of all the clothes Blaise wore the entire day.
That’s about the percentage of his overall wardrobe that we’ve bought for him: 10%. All the rest of his clothes are hand-me-downs from a particularly generous co-worker of Bryan’s and his family. They’ve got a little boy almost exactly one year older than Blaise, so it works out perfectly for us.
We got lucky with Camilla, too: another of my husband’s co-workers has a daughter 18 months older than Camilla, so we get all her used clothes. Because of the seasons not lining up we’ve had to buy a few more things for Camilla (besides, she was our first-born and a girl - I wasn’t going to forgo that privilege entirely!) but we’ve received quite a lot of wearable stuff for her, too.
I think the hand-me-down set-up is great because it combines two excellent things: convenience and frugality. We don’t have to be constantly buying clothes for our children and we save lots of money in the process.
I’m especially grateful for the hand-me-downs because the penny-pinching side of me can’t justify buying our kids new wardrobes every season, especially when they’re babies and wearing a new size every three months. I am not a bargain-shopper or a garage-saler. I don’t have much patience for sorting through stuff and I appear to have been born without that gene that makes people feel triumphant at a good find. This makes me all the more grateful for the families that give us their clothes. They’re not only saving us money, they’re making my life so much easier and happier.
Do you get hand-me-downs from other families you know? Are you a skilled bargain-shopper? Do you love garage sales? Do your kids wear all-new stuff? Please share!
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