Second-hand memories

I'm at that point where I'm starting to feel like I can get rid of some of the stuff in the basement. You know the stuff I'm talking about. The baby stuff. The booster seats and the baby bjorn and the fleecy carseat covers and the ginormous body pillow I treated myself to for my second pregnancy - because I remembered all too well the feeling in my hips that my mattress had been replaced by bare planks of wood - and then somehow I hardly ever used it. I've advertised them all, and little by little I'm replacing them with nice slim green strips of paper that go into my wallet and don't take up any space in the basement at all. (Soon they won't take up space in my wallet either. Oh well. Them's the breaks.)

I'm keeping the pack'n'play (travel cot) and the simple high chair in case of visitors, and a couple of other things are earmarked for friends. I still have a box or three of tiny baby clothes, and a box of maternity gear, but as the children get older it's becoming easier and easier - not to mention a lot more practical - to give things away as soon as they're grown out of. I keep a few things of Monkey's that might be gender-neutral enough for Mabel in a year or two's time, but otherwise, every time I have a grown-out-of pile, I run through my mental list of people whose children are a year or two younger and don't have an older same-sex sibling, and I ask them if they'd like some stuff.

I don't know if it's an American thing, or something more peculiar to the area I live in, or just a parenting thing, but I'm growing to love hand-me-downs. I love putting a sweater on my daughter that belonged to her brother before her, and maybe even her two cousins in Ireland before that. I love that her favourite blue raincoat came from her cousins in California but somehow originated in Dunnes Stores (the Irish version of Target, sort of). I love bringing a bag of clothes to our neighborhood clothing swap and seeing friends pull out some of my favourite things to fit their own children, and picking up some finds of my own. Thrift stores are great resources, clothing co-ops have wonderful bargains, yard sales are fab, but nothing beats free kids' clothes.

Here's Monkey, aged almost three, wearing a hand-me-down from his Irish cousins. (Who is that brown-haired, grey-eyed baby with him? Surely not his blonde, green-eyed little sister?)

And lookit, there's Mabel, this July in Cardiff, wearing the same thing. Isn't that nice? (I know that looks like a sausage on a stick that she's eating, but it's actually a Mini-Moo icecream, which is basically chocolate milk in frozen pop form, and the ideal size for small children. Wish they had them here.

I may have said this before, but as a child I was clothed almost entirely in hand-me-downs, as I had the (mis)fortune to have five older girl cousins all geographically close to us. I was a bit of a tomboy, and didn't care much until I was about 13, when I finally demanded some clothes of my own. Before that, my memory of new clothes is limited to Christmas-present pyjamas, duffle coats that would be the envy of Paddington Bear, and bargain-basement jeans.

One day I went shopping with my dad, under orders to get new jeans. We went to Cornelscourt, site of the largest Dunnes in the country (it still is; back then it wasn't nearly so fancy, and was very reminiscent of a school building, with grey floor tiles and strip lighting). My father had no idea what size I was - what, did they not put ages on the sizes then? Maybe I was at that awkward in-betweeny stage of 12 or so - and I remember him producing his architect's tape measure from his anorak pocket and professionally stretching it down the length of my leg as if I was a piece of plywood in Chadwick's. I was probably mortified, but it's a nice memory now.

Every so often a bag of clothes would arrive from the cousins, and I'd eagerly riffle through it. On one occassion a lovely soft green wool turtleneck appeared that looked familiar to my mother. Yes, she had donated it to the cousins, five girls or so ago, and here it was, perfectly good, now back in our house for another round. It was my favourite jumper that year.

By cost-per-wear calculations, it probably should have been paying me by then.