When I walked through my apartment's front door after giving birth to my first son, his nursery was awash in new baby gear and ready to go. The walls were covered in blue striped wallpaper, his bassinet was outfitted in crisp white linens, and his changing table was filled with diapers, wipes, creams, and kimono-style undershirts. But it wasn't that way when I walked out of the apartment five days earlier. In fact, his nursery was still our dining room then and we didn't have a single baby item in our home. Aside from the almost 10-month pregnant woman waddling out our door, no one would have believed that soon-to-be parents lived there — and that's just the way we wanted it.

I come from a long line of superstitious Jewish women — and so does my husband. "If you eat out of the pot, it will rain on your wedding day," I was brought up to believe. "If you spill salt, you have to throw it over your left shoulder." And then came the one that stuck with me for my entire pregnancy: "You don't have a baby shower because it is rubbing your happiness in other people's faces and you don't want the evil eye to seek vengeance." It extended well beyond the baby shower into all aspects of "getting ready for baby." I could pick out a crib, but I couldn't bring it into the house. I could pick out my baby's nursery decor, but I couldn't actually decorate the walls.

Sure, I could have broken the tradition, but secretly, I was so happy to be pregnant that I just didn't want to jinx anything. And since we couldn't do any real decorating, we figured we might as well be surprised with the gender of the baby, too.

This naturally lead to questions about how we were preparing for baby and how we could be sure we'd have everything we needed when we got home from the hospital [1]. The truth of the matter is, it was easier than you can imagine. You really don't need much for those first few days.

• The bassinet: A family heirloom, it sat in a family member's home until the baby arrived. It then magically appeared in my apartment the day the baby was born.
• The crib, changing table, and glider: They were ordered from local stores that must be familiar with age-old Jewish superstitions, because they agreed to hold them in their stores/warehouses until we needed them.
• The wall decor: I picked out both boy and girl wallpapers and matching paints, so when the baby was born, we knew what needed to be bought. My husband then surprised me by having the room painted and wallpaper hung while I awaited my hospital discharge.
• The clothes: We went traditional here and picked out both a boy and a girl layette [2] that the store held onto. One of the first phone calls we made from the hospital was to the clothing store, where they packaged up the boy clothes and had them ready for a family member to pick up later that day.
• The crib linens: We got a bit sneaky here, as the set I wanted needed to be ordered, and took several weeks to make. So we had the ultrasound technician write the baby's gender on a slip of paper and put it in a sealed envelope. That envelope was delivered to the store so they could get to work on the linens. They were delivered a week after the baby's arrival.
• The incidentals: As for the rest, they all came in as gifts within the first week or so of our son's arrival. The diaper pail, the baby bath, the swing, the bouncy chair, and all of those goodies. As experienced moms will tell you, they're luxuries, not necessities, and we got by the first few days without them.

The only "baby item" we really needed in those first few days was the infant car seat, in order to be released from the hospital. Luckily for us, a cousin who was well-versed in superstitions knew that and gifted it to us in the hospital the night he was born.

While the superstition often felt stifling while I was pregnant, in the end, it actually became a lot of fun. While I never had the chance to sit in the baby's nursery before he arrived, I spent plenty of days and nights in there once he was in my arms. And lest you think the superstitions ended there, don't fret. Within hours of our son coming home, my mother-in-law informed me that she had tied a red ribbon to the underside of his bassinet — you know, to ward off the evil eye and keep bad luck away [3] now that he was home!