Return 80% of the clothes you get as presents for the first six months. They grow so quickly, they only wear them for a moment, and anyway they're not going out on the town the first few months: they're mostly at home, or with grandma, and no one cares if they're just wearing a plain blue onesie, rather than the adorable expensive outfit.Reminds me of the B-school friend who advised registering for individual pans and knives, then exchanging them for the sets to increase our wedding gift yield. But I don't know; I think it'd be pretty hard to take this Ralph Lauren cashmere bunting back. ITSJUSTSOADORABLE. $195. [polo.com]Plus you get more gifts than you need at the start, and you get very few gifts after the first few months. So save your credits until the baby is older, and you can spread out the "birth" gifts so you don't have to pay for baby's clothes until they are 2 years old!
"...anyway they're not going out on the town the first few months..."
I disagree with you there. We took our son to London when he was 10 weeks old. A corduroy school boy jacket with Union Jack flag patch on the front pocket helped when we needed to get him into the Mint Leaf for dinner. Never under estimate the power of good clothes.
I can't disagree more with this philosophy! Sure, return whatever you don't like, but why dress your lovely new baby in crap clothes for the first months of his/her life? Sure, maybe baby doesn't make as many outings as later on, but what about all the photos you're taking that will be passed down generations? What about the simple pleasure of dressing your newborn in delectable clothes? Jeez.
[you mean taking some pictures THEN returning them? I guess that'd work, too. You just have to be careful with the tags. -ed.]
My 3 1/2 month old daughter is only just now fitting into 3-6 month clothes and wore her newborn stuff and 0-3 month stuff until just about a week ago or so. All babies don't grow at the same rate. Also, they often pee and poop on several outfits a day, so unless you want to be doing laundry daily, don't follow this advice.
Wow -- the serious flame on the seemingly harmless topic of gift returns! I just want to say I didn't dress my kids in crap clothes. LOL. I think my baby has a lot of sweet clothes -- some of them are quite expensive. A few adorable boutique outfits seemed like enough. I have found so far that we have much more clothing than we need. Maybe we're also a special case, our baby has also grown ridiculously fast -- at four months, he's wearing 6-12mo clothes. So it really hit home, we barely had gotten the 3-6 months clothes into circulation before he had grown out of them!
The other thing I've learned about kids' clothes is that a couple of times of year the great boutiques have incredible sales. We went to Boo and the Duck in Tribeca 2 weeks ago and bought about six different outfits for Old Navy Prices... my favorite NY clothing store for kids, Paulina Quintana, also had an incredible sale after Xmas.
What delightful and lovely gifts!!! I don’t knit but really appreciate the talent...