Out of all those colorful booties, soft blankets, and various contraptions, what baby gift was the most thoughtful or useful?  What gifts do you now give expectant families?

Among our favorite presents was a bag full of carefully selected, gently used baby garments.  Many people may shirk at receiving or giving hand-me-downs, but my sister-in-law knew that I ardently love recycled goods and bought me a huge bunch of clothes for the same price that she would have paid for one new outfit.   Another favorite gift was a copy of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree that was presented along with an young apple tree.  (It died later, but it’s the thought that counts!)  We were also gifted with items to borrow which included two slings and an Ergo carrier.  Being able to just use these items temporarily worked out perfectly!

My husband and I are still especially appreciative for the gifts of support we received.  Friends volunteered to baby sit for our eldest son, prepared meals and refinished our table for us. Those acts of service were incredibly helpful and low cost.

What gifts do I give?  While I truly believe that our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down-to-Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet is a great shower gift, it’s pretty presumptuous for me to foist it upon others without giving them some other goodies.  Baby baskets are always good bets and the one in the picture features tools for making homemade baby food.  I also love buying practical stuff that will be used many times like cloth diapers, crib sheets or eco-friendly baby toiletries.

Please share your gift ideas with the rest of us!

Balloon bum: An adorable, bulky-bottomed look caused by diapering baby in cloth.  May lead parents to adore cloth diapers for fashion reasons rather than just their obvious economic and environmental appeal.

Most of us embrace “balloon bum”—but dressing your baby can be challenging when most clothes are designed for disposable clad bottoms.  You can buy bigger pants and roll up the legs or stretch a pair of tights around the whole diaper—but I’ve just found a new solution.

This winter I discovered Baby Legs, baby leg warmers that stretch up to baby’s thighs without needing to cover the diaper.  Here are the reasons I LOVE this product:

• I don’t have to take them off during a diaper change!  If it’s a particularly messy diaper I may pull them down to her ankles, clean her up and then simply pull them back up.

• She won’t outgrow them for years.  The tights come in one size fits all so she can wear them as a toddler and a preschooler.
• They’re great for potty training because your child can still have warm legs when going diaperless.

• They can also be used on arms or stretched over pants on a cold day.  At home I sometimes put her just in a t-shirt, diaper, and her Baby Legs so that she can easily crawl and roll around without being encumbered by pants.

• Baby Legs are undeniably cute!  Beyond the function and length of time these little garments can be worn, they come in really fun patterns and colors.

Some of you talented knitters could probably whip a pair of these up in no time.  For the rest of us, you can order Baby Legs on Amazon.  You can find a few pairs on sale for as little as 5.99 but they are regularly $12.00 a pair or a bit more for an organic set.  Jefferies Socks Baby Leg Warmers are just $5.50 a pair, but the sizes are just 1-3 months or 3-12 months.

Although I am an incurable tightwad, I have to confess that I bought several pairs of these online and love them!   It’s tricky to keep them both together in the laundry, but otherwise I adore them.  Have you tried Baby Legs?

Are you still suffering flashbacks from wrapping, taping, and then cleaning up mounds of paper this year?  Even if you tried to go green by using recycled paper, wrapping everything and then cleaning up the holiday mess is labor intensive.  You may never have had have time to sew up a batch of gift bags before the holiday crush, but why not do it now?  Holiday fabric and ribbon are on sale and it will only take you about two hours to make bags that can wrap up all your gifts for years to come—with no waste and no yearly cost.  (My mom is still wrapping our gifts in festive bags that we’ve used for over thirty years!)  While you’re at it, whip up a few out of simple patterned fabric and have bags that can be used for birthdays, Valentines, and random surprises.

I am NOT a talented seamstress, but I’ll walk you through the steps so that you can stitch up some holiday bags yourself.  This one is made from ribbon we got for seventy-five percent off and fabric I had left over from my daughter’s curtains.

You’ll need:

• Fabric (as much as you’d like to make small and large bags)
• A sewing machine (Try to borrow one for an afternoon!)
• Fabric Ribbon
• Pins (optional)

First fold the fabric so that the outside pattern is facing inward.

Then cut two six-inch pieces of holiday ribbon.  Lay the pieces on top of each other and sandwich them between the seam toward the top of the bag with the ribbon strings extending inward.

Sew a seam around the three sides of the bag, including the ribbon in the seam.  Then turn the bag inside out.  Finish off the bag by doing a rolled seam on the top edges to prevent fraying.  You’re done!

If you have time and skills you can applique patterns onto the bag front or stitch on decorative ribbons.  You can also use iron-on letters to personalize bags for each of your children. (My mom finally gave me mine after I’d had it for my entire childhood.)

The finished bags look really cute, pack up easily, and won’t cost you a dime for decades to come!  I hope you get a bit of time to make things easier on yourself next year.  If you’re swamped you can ask a crafty family member to whip you up a homemade set or buy a Wrapsacks set of gift bags on Amazon.  Have you found a way to avoid wrapping paper?  Please share!

After months of grogginess, we recently experienced a night with eight continuous hours of sleep.  It was life changing.  Suddenly we could complete our sentences and even remember where we left our keys.

People who regularly doze for sizeable chunks have no idea what an uninterrupted snooze can do for a sleep-deprived family in those first few months.  It revitalizes body and soul, regenerates our sadly withered coping skills, and helps us see the world, and our baby, in a whole new light.  (Think precious bundle instead of ten-pound heartless, sleep-depriving dictator.)

If someone would have offered to take my child for a night so that I climb between the sheets at 8am and get long hour stretch of unconsciousness, I think I would have cried with sheer happiness.

If you can’t manage taking baby for the entire night, volunteering for just a few hours of babysitting is also a tremendous help.  Parents can slip out for a coffee date or even flee to the cinema to play hooky from child rearing for just a few hours.

So, if you haven’t found the perfect present for the frazzled new mom in your life, give the gift of your time.  I truly believe that most new parents would value the break over any material item you could possibly give them.

Do you have other ideas for no-cost gifts for new parents?  Please share!

If you’re scrambling to get your holiday shopping done in these last few days before Christmas, you may want to consider a radical idea: A holiday without presents.  It may sound dismal at first, but consider that it would also be debt-free, stress-free and waste-free.  What would that be like?

You’ll still get the holiday songs, family togetherness, great food, and cheer.  Plus, if you have a new baby she’ll never know the difference and won’t remember either way.

If you’re not willing to give up presents entirely or if you have older kids that would protest the shift, it is nice to at least reduce the gift hullabaloo.  In our extended family we simply draw names for nieces and nephews and skip gifts for adults.  The price limit for children’s gifts is just ten dollars so we have to be thoughtful and work within a small budget.  It has made the holidays so much more relaxing for all of us!

Families who really love gift giving can experiment with homemade presents or perhaps give gifts of experience such as children’s museum memberships or tickets to a children’s concert so that you gather memories instead of stuff.

Does your family have any strategies for limiting the gift giving craziness?  Do you find that it’s tricky to reduce holiday gifts when you have older children?  We’d love to hear how you manage it!

Searching for a somewhat bizarre gift for your eccentric uncle or this year’s white elephant gift exchange?  The following four are somewhat functional but mostly just weird presents for your holiday list.

If someone you know is struggling to sell a house this holiday season, they may need Ecojoe—the Original Eco-Friendly St. Joseph Statue Home Selling Kit.  Who the heck is St. Joseph? He’s the patron saint of real estate.  For years he’s been buried in the yards of those hoping to find an interested buyer.  Does anyone really need an eco-friendly, biodegradable statue of a saint?  Probably not, but it is a fun gag gift that may bring stressed out homeowners a laugh.

The I Am Not a Paper Cup mug is wonderfully deceptive.  Crafted from a ceramic mug and a silicone lid, it looks identical to a paper cup but is far eco-friendlier.

We’re sure you’ve been asking yourself, “How can I spoil my feline friend with eco-friendly products?” The Green Organic Eco Friendly Cat Bundle of Products is a helpful kitty gift basket that includes citrus magic litter box odor eliminator and bath wipes—among other essential cat grooming items!

Our favorite eco-friendly gift is the Elephant Poo Poo Paper Notebox.  Yes, this thick, high quality note paper is made from elephant dung. Recycling the feces of large mammals has never been such fun!

Have you come across any fun eco-friendly products lately?  We’d love to hear about your finds!

The Green Year makes the perfect gift for either the seasoned treehugger or the emerging eco-phile. How is it possible for this book to appeal to readers on both ends of the green spectrum? Well, the tips manage to be simple for the newbies and novel enough for the treehugger’s bag of tricks.

Sure, you’ll find the usual suggestions for switching out light bulbs and turning down the thermostat in the winter. But did you know that filling your gas tank at night is greener than filling it during the day? Or where to donate an old bridesmaid’s dress? Or how to give your shoes an eco-friendly shine? The Green Year not only answers these questions but directs you to helpful websites and lets you know exactly how much energy you can save by following its advice.

The book offers 365 tips: one for each day of the year. Most of them are season-appropriate; for example, around October you’ll find several ways to make Halloween a little greener, and in the summer you’ll hear about air conditioners and sunscreen. This format sets The Green Year apart from other handbooks—but it also makes it difficult to navigate. There’s no table of contents or index, so if you read a great idea about replacing liquid body wash with bars of soap and want to reference it later, you either have to remember what day of the year it’s on (October 28^th) or flip through the entire book hunting it down.

Some of the tips might fall on the wrong day of the calendar depending where you live. March 27^th has us closing curtains to save energy during the winter—but it’s already spring! Author Jodi Helmer has us planning our vegetable gardens on April 28^th, which is when I planted mine this year. So while the tips are excellent, it could prove difficult to use the book as it’s intended.

Overall, The Green Year is a worthwhile read. Every single idea takes very little time or effort, and many of them will save you money in the long run. I’ve already dog-eared my copy in anticipation of all the small changes I plan to make in 2010.

There is nothing that quite compares to the bliss and brutality of those first few months with a newborn. It is truly shocking to realize that suddenly all your needs (including showers and trips to the bathroom) are secondary to taking care of another tiny life.

If you are currently in the mist of that fourth trimester, you deserve to treat yourself with a gift that can give you some perspective and patience. No matter what your spiritual beliefs, you will find practical wisdom and humble support in the pages of Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood by Karen Maezen Miller.  For the last few weeks I’ve read one chapter of this book every night before bed and I can’t believe how it has helped me be more attentive and appreciative as a parent.

Here’s a brief sample from her chapter entitled “Night Watch”

“Sleep is one of our most intractable attachments.  We claw and clutch and crave it.  We adorn it and worship it.  We four-hundred-thread count it.  It is our one sovereign domain…

Between a mother and a child, sleeplessness unfurls like a torture device. Who will crack?  Who will break?  Blessedly, you will.  You will give up and go forth to the cries.  You will let go of your resistance, your willful inertia.  You will drop the dead weight of your needs so that you can gather up your child to feed, succor and sleep.  You will break with your greedy, sleepy, clandestine self.  Yes, you will do it every time.  This is your new spiritual practice.”

And somehow, when I think of those nighttime feedings as spiritual practice, it helps me crawl out from between the sheets and crack open the nursery door without resentment.

Miller repeatedly reminds us to return to the moment.  The moment when your child is screaming in your ear, the moment that you have to nurse for the fifth time in so many hours, the moment that your baby spits up all over you just as you step out of the shower, the moment she smiles for the first time. We often get caught up in how easy it will be once baby can sit, eat solids, or roll over.  Gently and with humor, she reminds us that each phase will bring its own challenges.  She asks us to sit up, pay attention, and enjoy.

Lest this book sounds too esoteric or judgmental, you should know that she also reminds us to give ourselves a break.  Extremes make us crazy.  If you feel that using a disposable diaper is off limits, maybe you need to relax and change the rules while traveling.  If you feel that your child can eat only whole grain granola, be prepared for your little one to prefer white bread.  Over and over again she reminds us to relax, trust ourselves, and embrace moderation.  What a relief!

Has anyone else had a chance to read Momma Zen? What did you think? Have you come across any great reads for those first arduous months?  What helped you make it through?

What are you hoping you’ll receive for baby this year?  A new batch of cloth diapers, a bit of free babysitting, or an eco-friendly rattle?  Please tell us what you’re wishing for.  (Then you can strategically tell friends and family to read your comments!)

Cute eco-friendly rattle–just $7!

Here’s how you assemble a wonderful gift basket for a new mom. Still need ideas? Here are some more:

A Boppy pillow. Both of us managed to raise our babies with very limited baby gear—and we both had Bobby pillows. They make breastfeeding easier by propping the baby up to the right position, easing the strain on the back and arms. As baby grows older, you can use it to prop him in a sitting position.

Note: You aren’t supposed to let your baby sleep on the Boppy! We kept our eye on her–just a week old!

Kindle. A Kindle—are we kidding? Well, a ways back we wrote this post, posing the question: Is a Kindle greener than regular old books? Sure, it saves trees and shipping fuel, but a wireless reading device uses batteries and may end up clogging a landfill one day. Still, we’d heard that it’s perfect for reading books while breastfeeding–turn the page with the click of a button! Avid readers who like to buy all their books instead of borrowing from the library claim to save money in the long run.

Is a Kindle greener than ordinary books?

Speaking of plain old books . . . We have a few to recommend for new moms. Of course there’s the Eco-nomical Baby Guide. Our own book doesn’t hit the shelves until March of 2010, but it is already available for pre-order! We also recommend HappyBaby by Dr. Robert Sears and Amy Marlow and Raising Baby Green by Dr. Alan Greene.

A nice water bottle. Nursing mothers need to keep hydrated! Sigg water bottles come in several colorful designs, and they aren’t made out of plastic. Once they’ve reached the end of their useful life, they can be recycled. In addition, 1% of the proceeds go to environmental causes.

A breast pump and glass bottles. The expecting mother in your life may have registered for the breast pump of her choice. We like the Medela breast pumps. Please comment on other brands that you love!

If you have bought gifts for a new mother—or if you are a new mother yourself—let us know what your favorite gifts were!