It's probably an appropriate moment to thank everyone who sends me all the wonderful tidbits - THANK YOU! Keep 'em coming!
And now, an important baby topic that I discovered thanks to multiple lovely friends: bumpers. Not the bumpers on the backs of cars that look like scrap metal after a couple years living in NYC (writing from personal experience). Not bumpers as in the rubber strips along the sides of a bowling lane and prevent your big ball from sliding into the gutter. Bumpers as in the padding that lines the inner sides of a crib.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics - crib bumpers are bad. Bad as in get them out of your baby's crib and throw them in the garbage. Just yesterday I was directed to an article on cnn.com (thanks friend!) that explained the potential dangers of crib bumpers. They can injure or even kill (by suffocation or strangulation) a baby. While I can't explain the medicine or the science better than CNN already has (so check out the article here), I can point you in the direction of crib bedding that doesn't include bumpers...which is somewhat hard to find. Typically crib bedding comes in three or four piece sets: sheets, crib skirt, bumper and sometimes a quilt. But now that we know bumpers are bad, let's not waste money on them, right?
If you avoid the "collections" and check out the nursery basics,
you can purchase the crib skirt and sheets separately.
Everything can be purchased a la carte a Pottery Barn Kids.
Only the sheets come on there own (here), everything else is packaged in a bedding set. Boo.
Everything comes separate at Babies R Us, fantastic. But...the cuteness options are slim pickins.
