We decided to buy many appliances on Amazon Prime Day recently and I felt the need to justify it to myself because, well, we’ve lived a year and a half in Germany without them. So why do we need them now? Was it just because of the discounts?

To talk something concrete, let me list the things we bought: a slow cooker, two Tefal nonstick pans, a washer-dryer combo laundry machine, a night light, a weighing scale, a rice cooker, and an Amazon Echo Dot.

Now on to justifying.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had issues with convenience. More accurately, I’ve always found that convenience is not always a good thing.

Convenience makes people lazy, inconsiderate, and ungrateful. Everything should be done chop-chop so that one can move on to the next thing, pronto. Convenience, creature comforts, luxuries… I lump these into the same bucket of things that make your life better only if you know where you are going. It’s like that Echosmith song:

Yeah, they’re living the good life, can’t see what he is going through They’re driving fast cars, but they don’t know where they’re going In the fast lane, living life without knowing

For a year and a half living in Germany, I’ve not needed the convenience that these recent purchases will afford me and my wife. So what changed?

Simple: we’re preparing for our firstborn daughter, Charlotte. And we could use some convenience to balance out the new inconveniences that any newborn child would bring into a couple’s lives!

A slow cooker is going to help make nutritious soups hands-free and keep them warm throughout the day.

A washer-dryer combo is going to shave 15 to 20 minutes off each laundry run by shifting from washing to drying automatically. This I expect is going to be particularly helpful with food-stained and poop-soiled clothes. (TK insert onslaught)

The Tefal nonstick pans, which so far works stupendously, will help us cook and wash up faster.

The night lamp is going to help us change Charlotte’s diaper without bringing on a light flood that jolts her awake if she was already sleepy. From what I’ve learned from friends of ours, this is going to ultimately let us sleep train her so that we can in turn sleep for longer blocks of time.

The weighing scale is for keeping track of our body weight as well as Charlotte’s. You know, BMI healthy living stuff.

The rice cooker is going to help us make rice and keep it warm, hands-free.

And the Amazon Echo Dot I think is going to help us play white noise in the room where she is going to sleep. I’ll be scheduling a routine for the Alexa app to do this for sure.

So that’s it. Writing this down helped justify the purchase of convenience to myself. All of this is so that we can, hopefully, help a baby grow healthily.