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I’ll be the first to admit that #MomLife is HARD. Like, way harder than I anticipated.

I mean, I obviously never expected it to be easy. But I didn’t know it would be this hard.

Like, dig-yourself-out-of-cement-with-a-plastic-fork hard.

But in my 18 months of experience (read: not very much), I’ve picked up a few essential tools for survival. The jackhammer to your plastic fork. These are the 10 items I actually couldn’t survive motherhood without:

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Getting gifts for babies has always been a challenge for me. They don’t really have interests yet, like older kids, and it’s hard to know what toys are developmentally right for what age, unless you’re living and breathing it.

That’s why I created my Gift Guide for Babies last year, and I got such a great response to it, that I thought I’d create more of them as my son continues to grow into new toys. Some of the toys on that list are still big favorites in our house, so make sure to visit that list too, if you haven’t already.

So with that, here are his current favorites:

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Let’s be real, everyone knows it doesn’t matter what you get your baby – no matter what it is, he’s just going to want to play with the box it came in. Or a spatula. Or the TV remote. Or the dang Christmas tree that now has multiple layers of security surrounding it to protect it from his sticky, grabby, destructive paws.

But, we all still have this irrational desire to get our child the “perfect” gift, one that will surely bring him endless joy, that he’ll remember forever and ever and definitely not forget all about the instant he spots the pile of wrapping paper trash from across the room. So, now that I’ve gotten a year of overzealous toy-buying under my belt, it’s easy to look back and remember the ones that actually did stick around for more than 5 minutes. Here are some of the favorites at our house from each stage:

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