5 Incredibly Useful Baby Items Under $5 (or free!)

Surprise! Baby stuff is expensive. Although I've always loved a good bargain, it's now even more of a priority. Here are five little things that I've found to be super cheap and extremely helpful in baby raisin' - without compromising safety or quality.


Plastic grocery bags + empty Kleenex box (free): I can't take credit for this idea - I read it somewhere else quite a while ago. However, it's been a great way to corral all those bags into one place for diaper disposal. We don't even mess with a diaper pail... just yank a bag from the box, toss the dirty dipe in the bag, and throw it out with the regular garbage. We have one in Hank's changing table and one in the car. 

Dollar General bottles ($1): It'll probably become apparent after a short time that I love the Dollar General (around here, we put "the" in front of all retail stores and restaurants - the Wal-Mart, the Target, the Pizza King). Don't get it twisted with the Everything's a Dollar-type stores - they are more or less terrible in my experience. Anyway, I have had great luck with the bottle I picked up on a night where I was headed to meet family for dinner and realized that I had forgotten Hank's bottle. The DG was the closest store to where I was going and I figured I could just make do with it for that night. It ended up being one of the best dollars I've ever spent - they don't leak, the nipples are medium flow and just perfect for Hank, and they're BPA free. I went back and got two more after realizing they make Dr. Brown look like he got his medical degree from a gumball machine.

Dollar General socks ($1 to $2): I find baby socks to be very frustrating. They're always so huge and oddly shaped and the cuffs are never tight enough to prevent accidental sock removal. Dollar General, however, makes the best baby socks EVER. They're made of really thick, soft terrycloth, they wash very well and they actually stay on.

Lots-o-Links ($4.99 on Amazon): Use these for attaching toys to strollers and high chairs (to avoid having to constantly pick up and clean the damn things once your baby figures out how awesome gravity is), to extend dangling toys from the car seat handle, or just as regular toys themselves. Hank loves munching on the ones with extra bumpy textures.

Zippered garment/bedding bags (free with the purchase of whatever's originally inside): I've always used these for comforter/blanket storage, but their usefulness can not be overstated once you have kids. And since they seem to be the gold standard for baby item packaging, you can accumulate quite a lot of them. I use them for storing Hank's clothes by size, for toys, bedclothes... anything you can think of. The package that the Lots-O-Links came in? Full of outgrown socks. Added bonus: we have a very old house that occasionally gets musty-smelling when it's humid, and the garment bags do a great job of keeping that smell at bay.