Sleeping Arrangements

This whole situation will be highly affected by your opinions on attachment parenting & co-sleeping (and its various forms), the layout of your house, the personality of your baby, whether or not you'll be nursing... this is highly dependent on circumstance.  Here's my experience.

From the time my daughter was born until she was 3 months old, she slept in our room in this bassinet.  I chose this for several reasons.  In our house, the master bedroom is on the first floor, and my daughter's room was on the second floor.  I felt it was better for the sake of convenience and not falling down the stairs in the middle of the night that I keep her in our room until she was sleeping through the night consistently (we moms use that term loosely, but... I think you get the point).  I really loved this bassinet because it was affordable, had adjustable height levels for age/size of baby, and was small enough to fit in our small room.  A standard play yard size simply wouldn't have fit in our room, so this was an easy choice!

When sweet baby decided to start sleeping like a big girl at such a young age (don't hate me!), we went ahead and moved her upstairs to her crib at 3 months old.  By that time she was sleeping a 3-hr stretch and then a 5-7 hr stretch, so there wasn't much middle-of-the-night stair-climbing.  I got our crib on Craigslist - a grandma in our area had bought a brand new crib for her granddaughter, who slept there only a handful of times.  It was such a good price and it was local, so I went for it.  If you do buy on Craigslist, make sure to check your crib model for recalls.  There have been a lot of crib recalls lately, especially on drop-side cribs, and the company will either replace it or send a recall kit to replace/fix the parts in question. 

About the crib mattress - some moms are brave enough to go used, but I wasn't.  I figured our daughter will be sleeping on it for probably several years, and Lord willing so will a subsequent child (no I don't have any announcements to make!).  We'll get plenty of use out of a new one, and I would rather have the peace of mind knowing that my child is sleeping on a pet-free, smoke-free, other-child-body-fluid-free mattress.