PRODUCTS YOU WISH YOU HAD NEVER BOUGHT

[Willow2]

Does anyone else out there have a baby product they hate with a vengeance? I made the mistake of buying the Chicco Mamma high chair because it looked the business and I'd inherited a load of other Chicco bits and bobs that were great. Being a first time mum I didn't think about how easy it would be to clean. If I tell you that the tray alone has over 30 nooks and crannies for food to get into it will give you an idea of just how badly designed this item is. It is an absolute nightmare to keep clean - yesterday, after a lunch of tuna/rice salad, I ended up sticking it in the garden and turning the high pressure hose on it. Aside from the cleaning aspect it is also far too big for anyone under the age of 21. My son is fifteen months and above average height yet still has to have a booster seat in it. Plus the tray doesn't come in far enough so half his lunch ends up down his bib or on the floor. I hate it with every inch of my body and can only presume that it was designed by a mysognistic sadist for a laugh. I don't know if I can face another year of dealing with it and am seriously thinking of taking an axe to it, whacking it on the bonfire and buying a £10 one from Ikea instead. Any other suggestions for my pire of useless products?

ELC bouncy castle plus paddling pool! The kids absolutely loved it the first year (1999) and it saved us hiring abouncy castle for 12 2 - 4 year olds BUT we had a lot of sun that year and just left it out. Last year (and this) the sun has only arrived for about 1 day at a time. I then get requests (nags) from the kids to get it out to play. Thats great, but it takes 2 hours to blow it up! Also, we've got 3 punctures already, and we have been careful with it, so one of the towers keeps drooping, and now the outer ring at the bottom is punctured so we have to keep blowing it up - more trouble than it's worth.
As regards paddling pools, my vote goes to the 3 ring one from Argos or woolies. Costs £10, you can blow it up by mouth alone in 10 minutes if you have to, and it's cheap enough to throw away if it bursts.

lil, i sympathise about the bouncy chair, one of mine bounced chair and all off the kitchen table face down - splat - onto the kitchen floor (i used to put a wet cloth under its sides to stop it moving but either i forgot or some helpful soul removed it...!)

amazingly, after a long stunned silence, i don't think he even cried! too amazed, apparently. and apart from a small bruise on his forehead/nose, no marks either. he's nearly 13 now and at grammar school so it didn't do much harm!

Sorry Janh - but the mental image of that is hysterically amusing!!

What an excellent thread, especially when you read the anodyne rubbish that is written on the packets and in the baby mags about the indispensibility of these products. All my faves are here. The Prima Pappa (BRIGHT blue and yellow), with festering crevices, for example. We made the understandable mistake of dunking the whole tray into the sink to give it a good scrub. The tiny holes in its moulding let water in that was still seeping out days later, despite my shaking it over the bath for hours. Hateful bloody thing. We bought one of those folding booster seats, one quarter the price of the high chair, and it has been fine. And as for the playnest...although at two my son has finally found a use for it. He puts it on his head and runs around careering into furniture, laughing. I broke four fingernails trying to assemble the gym, Croppy, and yes, mine collapsed constantly too.
We have been quite stalinist about V-Tech and just won't have it in the house. Even the English-language version sounds like daleks.
I will stick up for the Sangenic, though. Ours has been a great success - we started out in a second-floor flat, where it was essential. And, as Alibubbles said, other items you might not be able or willing to flush down the lav can go in too.

croppy, it was for us - afterwards!!!

good job he has a hard head though. the moral of this story is... DON'T PUT BOUNCY CHAIRS ON TABLES!!!!!!

bébé confort 3 in 1 thing. I hated it so so so much. It cost loads - nearly £300 and it was so rubbish. The centre of gravity was all wrong with the carrycot so it was really difficult to push. The swivel wheels gunked up so they wouldn't swivel after about 3 weeks. I lived in central London and had had a c-section, so how much walking did I do? Yet the customer service was terrible, and for a whole month it was in service so I couildn't even use it. (How long is the lifer span of a carrycot anyway?. Then they refused to give me a refund so after months of battling I was stuck with this crap monstrosity. I eventually moaned so much my in laws bought me a £60 buggy from Mothercare which was so much better.
I would recommed to anybody lookining to buy a pushcahir to avaid bébé confort like the plague, and also not get one that has a framed, separate rain cover. What a pain in the backside. too big & cumbersome to put in the shopping tray. the cassis didn't fold with it attatched. What the hell do these designer think you're going to do with it? I know what I'd like tpo do with it. I havbe now happily had another kiddy, so could justify to my disgruntlrd dh getting a double, and never use the damned thing again. I swear, I looking enviously at every single (cheaper) pushchair ever single day for a whole year. The battle I had with the outrageous retailer and the manufacturer still makes me want to scream.

Oh and that stupid cot melody & light show thing - Tomy? not sure who made it, but the whirring of the mechanism is so loud you have to put the 'music' or bubbly sound so loud I cannot see how anyone is supposed to sleep - and it just eats through batteries so quickly.

Bo, totally agree about the cot music thing. I got the Fisher price watery dancing fish one, and you're right the whirring mechanism is so LOUD, the so called light reflection doesnt reach the ceiling or anywhere to reflect. Complete and utter waste of money. And so I told a lady who was about to buy one in John Lewis!

Sliding in here with some items I didn't buy but was given - a clutch of matinee jackets. A few were are cherished works of art in soft 2-ply wool. The others had done the rounds, given second-hand to me by friends, hardly worn.
These bobble-covered acrylic monsters with their many holes to trap baby fingers are a fit addition to Willow2's pyre. I would also add those overpriced, over-fussy baby hold-alls mentioned earlier. And (sorry if this offends anyone) most of those 'cute' ornaments for the nursery you can buy from high street jewellers. Like Janh I too would save my baby bath from the flames. Used inside a big bath it stops our bathroom carpet turning into marshland.

Thanks for warning me about big ELC swimming pools. I can now see how much lung power you would need to blow one of them up. Pity you can't pass that job on to your children. It would shut them up for hours.

Didn't actually buy these, but my MIL knitted for Scotland after our son was born. I did tell her that he could have any wool or woollen mixes near his skin or he had a rather horrible reaction and still does. But no she kept knitting and then moaned when he didn't wear anything that she had knitted!, honestly there was no telling the woman.

Oh, how I wish Mumsnet was around before our baby was born. Here's a brief run down of some of the unnecessary stuff we bought:
Sangenic nappy bin - how I hate that yellow pod. After the first usage, the plastic seemed to take on some hideous stale odour. We lost the inner ring with the first disposal. The cutter mechanism never worked properly and I would always have to find scissors ........grrr!
Travel system - another error. It is huge, heavy and wide and I used to demolish shops when I was using it. Fortunately my son was an early sitter and we swapped to a £20 buggy at 5 months and have never looked back.
Cot blankets - I bought 4. At least 3 too many. I wish now that I had waited until after our son was born before opening all of them but I had gone into efficiency overdrive and washed them in readiness for his arrival, so we couldn't take them back.
Tippitoes bouncer - not sure I've got exactly the right name but that was a waste of £25. It was fiddly to get son in it and then he was bored after 5 mins. We have it still in its box in perfect condition if anyone is interested?
Toys - 80% are never played with. Should have just bought a few more cutlery items, egg cups, bowls and saucepans.
You actually need a remarkably small amount of stuff for a newborn baby: somewhere for them to sleep, a car seat, a few clothes (you'll be given loads) and that's about it. If you are going to do alot of walking then a pram/puschair but you really need to properly road test those to see what's right for you. I know so many people who regret their first choice.
Everything else is for added convenience and it is very difficult to know what will be make your life easier until you have had the baby. My advice to any potential mums out there would be to hold off too much pre-birth expenditure. You can still go to the shops afterwards!

i would add, with ref to cot blankets, that if one should happen to turn into a "blankie" (cuddly essential, you know!) then you can't have too many....though of course they have to be identical, in feel and colour ideally. we got away with one white and one yellow, cut both in half when it became blankie and then we had one in cot, one at grandma's, one clean just in case...if you can manage to keep them all more or less clean then you don't get the "this doesn't feel/smell/taste right!" explosion when you have managed to sneak it away to wash it.
unfortunately though you can never predict what, if anything, will become The One!!!

Can't understand why you're all so down on the sangenic. We couldn't have done without it for our two - we would've been completed swallowed up by pooey nappies (remember the upset tummies?) without it. And no I've never lost the white bit in the middle, the cutters work and it does a good job of concealing the smell.
Also thought the Galt playnest was fab - when they were about to sit up but a bit wobbly it was just the job. Admittedly it has a short life - 3 months and they're out of it - but a good three months.

I would throw my hideously-expensive £70 playpen onto the pyre. Took up the whole living room, looked ugly and my 2 hated to be put in it. Also tippitoes bouncer was a real pain - constantly trying to get them in and out and killing my back, and the Moses baskets remain practically untouched by baby hand (one nightmare night only).

The playpen - yes, a waste, in our case, of a Christmas present. My baby screams blue murder so now I just plop him in his cot if I need a few uninterrupted minutes. The playpen is, however, a useful device for hanging damp towels/laundry on.

Useless items of clothing I have been given:
Dungarees without poppers down the legs - grr! don't go there.
A pack of sleepsuits (M&S maybe?) that didn't have poppers all the way down the front, just a few poppers across the shoulders and legs - bad enough dressing a newborn without these! Do you put them over the head or bum first, and baby's little arms kept on getting stuck - nightmare!
Straight to the charity shop after one wear.

Worst buy - in the sale half price cotton cot blanket £25 oh that will look nice, until it became 'blankie'. I refuse to buy another one (£50!!) but washing it is a military operation. And the night he was sick on it is still too traumatic to go into in detail...he would not let go, it did smell, so did the bedroom, and the hall, and the house. Beware what becomes a 'blankie'.

I'm all for trip trap chairs and sangenic bins. What I hate is the smell of nappy sacks, wipes etc, I'd rather have good old fashioned poo than that sweet, fake, vomit inducing stench.

I've got all the baby oil stuff as well, I thought once I'd had the baby other women would let me into the age old secret of what the hell these things were used for. What are you supposed to do with them?

I apply strict stalinist rules to toys that talk, they all meet a sticky end ha ha ha....

snowy, do you still have your blankie? have you tried sneakily bisecting it?

re baby oil - do you know any female teenagers? my 19-yr-old gets through pints of the stuff...(the bath is often disgusting but she has lovely smooth skin!)

one of my worst buys was the wrong size snowsuit; lovely suit but son was 7 months old in november, and tall, so i foolishly thought 6-12 months wouldn't see him through and bought 12-18 - it was far too big the first winter and, guess what, too small the second winter so we got no use out of it at all...(my fault, not the suit's!)

Janh I'm worried if i mutilate blankie it won't be the same and I'll have to but a new one.

snowy - well, yes at £50 i suppose i would worry about that too! how old is he? could you do it unsneakily? do a bit of demonstrating with bits of food and paper - hey, look, if we do this we have TWO of...whatever it is...if we did that with your blankie you would have 2 blankies!!!

then again, maybe not!

my ds has taken to the muslin cloths that you use for sick-ups as a comforter - we call it his "muzzy", and he doesn't care whether it's filthy dirty or freshly washed, lucky me!

actually, bron, i think jodee was expressing delight rather than dismay...what an obliging child!

What do you think about the baby alarms? Like most nervous new mothers I insisted on buying one but surely, unless you live in a castle, or a very noisy household, you can hear every squeak they make? Our son has been in his own room since 3 weeks and I have only bothered with the alarm twice.

Agree with travel system and sangenic comments - useless, fortunately we had borrowed so no expense incurred.

Best buys - borrow or get as much as you can second hand - it really doesn't all need to be brand new.

Janh, you are right! Muslins should definitely go on the list of Products I Couldn't Live Without.

lindy, we had a tomy baby alarm. our house is a medium sized victorian terrace with no through hall and a rear extension; as the baby slept at the front, if we were in the kitchen, or out the back, or having a snooze on the sofa or something, it was v reassuring to know that we would hear him promptly...useful also if away for the weekend or something. (batteries were useless though, all gone in 5 minutes, we kept it on mains generally.)

ALSO, it can be lovely and very entertaining to listen to them unawares when they first wake up and sing, chat, gurgle etc....(them, not us...)