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The year when you are pregnant and give birth certainly changes a LOT of things – even for someone who likes to keep a capsule wardrobe! This year I stopped buying all shoes (because I hear pregnancy can change your shoe size) and tried to get as many maternity and post partum clothing for free by doing sponsored posts with maternity brands and also by asking other mothers. It does not hurt to ask!
My two favorite partnerships by far were with Mother Bee Maternity and Dear Collective (they are not paying for me to post this here, I genuinely ended up keeping a lot of the clothes and re-wearing them). Through the partnerships I got about $700 retail price worth of clothing. Now personally, I would have probably only bought about $200, but I wanted to be transparent that I did go out of my way to get some clothing comped. So this technically expanded my wardrobe by about 15 pieces, of which I ended up giving away half after I finished my pregnancy because it got to be a lot.
The biggest regret spend this year was a gorgeous BCBGMaxAzria dress I’d wanted for years and found on Poshmark, that I’d hoped I could wear to the holiday parties this year, but alas, post partum, while my body (thanks to genetics mostly) recovered quickly in weight, all the remaining weight was in my chest, so the dress could not zip up.
The best purchase was bra extenders– best invention ever! They hook into your favorite bras as long as you get the sizing right. I wore these during and after pregnancy and I did not have to buy new bras as my chest got bigger!
I also got this very comfortable hospital robe as a treat to myself because I felt I’d feel quite miserable in the hospital. Turns out there were so many tubes connected to me as I lost a lot of blood that it was difficult to put on anything other than a hospital gown.
I had to pump for a few days after delivering my child because he had a tongue tie so it hurt really badly to nurse. I tried on three nursing bras and this is the one that someone ended up gifting to me that I ended up liking a lot.
Thanks to my local buy nothing group, I got some other items for free so it cut down on my clothing costs this year.
I’m probably going to have to update this post because there are still 5 days left in 2019 and I typically shop for all my clothes towards the end of the year. For example, I stupidly didn’t pack enough warm clothes for a rainy season in southern California and ran out to Nordstrom Rack for a cardigan – I landed this J.Crew one for $18
Those of you who followed me in my Instagram stories saw how I landed these two gorgeous vacation dresses at Nordstrom Rack for about $53 all-in. I look forward to wearing them throughout Southeast Asia!
Without further ado, here’s my spending on clothing for this year. In a normal year I would have also done some more sourcing and selling on Poshmark, but I just ran out of energy this year and did not feel like it. This still ended up, cash-wise, being the year I spent the least on clothing. We shall see what next year brings as I return to work.
