6
Jun
2010
Sophie – baby’s first status symbol? And our very first giveaway.
This is her. Skinny, Parisian and chic.
I don’t know if it has hit other parts of the world yet, but here in Europe if you don’t own Sophie, you may as well stay home – or stay hidden underneath the sun protector in your buggy or other baby anti-humiliation techniques. There is no way you could face life in the sandpit without knowing that you had Sophie waiting for you at home. Yes my friends – it’s not about highchairs or cots or even your designer buggy – if you don’t own Sophie La Giraffe, you are nobody.
Furthermore, if you don’t buy your baby one immediately, you are probably sentencing your child to a lifetime of lunches alone and dodgy denim choices (I have no memories like this to relate to, only ever having been seen wearing cool, up to the minute, always in fashion jeans. Cough denim hotpants cough).
But why? Why this French phenomenon? There are fifty five million different squeezy toys for babies (I counted), what makes Soph different? I’ll hazard a few (dodgy) guesses….
- She is French. Probably Parisian. And female. All Parisian women are skinny, chic, classic and colour coordinated. So is Sophie.
3
May
2010
By popular demand – THE BABY LIST. Essentials and almost essentials to buy.
This is like a picture of me at the dentist. I know - bad hair day.
Ages ago I wrote a post about baby things I had bought that I had wasted money on. I made a rash promise to post my spreadsheet of things that you SHOULD buy. Four months later I am coming good with my promise. I know. I’m reliable like that. You should hear my promises to my dentist – they are nothing short of inspiring and involve trips to hygienists, dental floss and 45 degree brushing angles.
Anyway, I digress. I know that interesting dentistry anecdotes is a post in itself but baby stuff I promised and baby stuff you shall have. There are many many things to buy when you are having a baby. And many many shops and online stores from which to buy these essentials. I say essentials. In actual fact, apart from a cot, a pram and some clothes, you’d be hard pressed to say anything was truly essential. But we are what we are. Well, actually, I am what I am. You may well be a far more worthy and green type person who buys the minimum, recycles stuff, freecycles it back into the community and is generally a better, kinder and more annoying person than me. If you are, can I suggest you stop reading? I think you will not enjoy my list of essentials.
4
Feb
2010
Make your own personalised word cloud canvas
I stumbled across website wordle.net a few months ago. Wordle lets you create your own word cloud image. I have been pondering ever since what a great gift it would be to use it to create a unique canvas for your baby’s room, or as a gift for, well, anyone. Or maybe you just want one for your own living room.
You can create your own word cloud image on wordle by entering a list of words and then changing the font, colours and the way the words are arranged. The image is yours to use as you wish, so you can save the file you’ve created and have it printed on canvas. (Google “print on canvas” and you’ll find any number of sites that will print your image on canvas and send it to you. Assuming you don’t live in Tristan da Cunha*).
12
Jan
2010
Baby Carriers – are you a hippy or a trendy?
I know very little about baby carriers and slings. But I am nothing if not helpful, and someone asked me the other day about which one was the best, so Alex – this one’s for you. Oh, and anyone else pondering the great unknown of the carrying/wearing world. Just writing to Alex would be weird. Although she is already probably slightly uncomfortable at having a whole post dedicated to her. Quite selfish the rest of you are thinking? I know – Alex is like that. Anyway, poor Alex, don’t be mean to her if you meet her, she can’t help being like that.
So slings, carriers and pack thingies – they are your big three segments. Slings are for babywearing hippies, carriers for trendy inner-city types and packs for healthy ruddy-faced outdoorsy types. Who carry hiking sticks. Got that? I love a good generalisation. Now this is not supposed to be the pinnacle of research, just a point in the right direction for beginners, to start you off even better than my ramblings, you might want to read this Which column.
22
Dec
2009
The dad’s role in pregnancy.
a pathetic attempt to appeal to the males
I wrote a whole post about Christmas traditions. Then the Captain told me he was over Christmas. And my traditions. Hmm, thought maybe the rest of the world was too (yes, I am aware that not EVERYONE in the world is reading our blog – more fool them) and I am all about pleasing the readers. One of his friends had some helpful suggestions about how I could improve the male readership of this blog. The key one was introducing sports coverage – specifically, blow by blow accounts of any event where England is playing Australia. Probably not going to happen today, but you’ll know when I start cutting and pasting the BBC sports coverage that things have got dire.
In the meantime – how about some thoughts on the male role in pregnancy? There are any number of books on the topic and hundreds of articles written every year. Most of them focus on loving support. It’s true, loving supportiveness is good, but there are some more specific steps you can take to ensure you remain the father of your unborn child. So here are Kate’s top tips on how you can be the best pregnancy person ever:
20
Dec
2009
Things I have wasted money on
If you ask my husband — most of my wardrobe, half the bathroom cabinet, all of my top drawer, the spice cupboard, the bottom three shelves of the bookshelf and everything in my half of the CD rack — falls into this category. But for the purposes of this post I will keep it to Items I Have Bought for Children or Childbearing Purposes. Also known as Things Kate’s Friends Should Have Told Her.
23
Nov
2009
More top tips before having a baby including great things to buy
This is not me interviewing my mates.
OK, further to yesterday’s top tips from my mates, here is the second part of my scientific research project…
What did you wish you had done in the early days?
- Travelled more when he was small! We didn’t take any weekend breaks which are so much easier before the wee one starts to want to move around.
- Taken more holidays – they are much easier to travel with when they are small.
- Written down the dates of her key milestones (crawling, sitting, walking) etc. I’ve already forgotten a lot of them.
- Printed off photos and started an album straight away, kept a record of milestones and videoed the first seven months as only got the camera out at 8 months.
- Had baby Panadol in the house after the first immunisation. Big mistake!
- Not wished the time away. I look back and wonder where the various stages have gone.
- Relaxed and gone with the flow! They are only tiny for such a short time so I wish I had felt that I didn’t have to be doing something all the time.
- Got more stuff in the freezer for post-baby.
22
Nov
2009
Top Tips before you become a parent. How to not freak out. Maybe.
Before I had my first baby I was FREAKING OUT. I am the opposite of the laid back type – I have a level of obsessive, spreadsheeting, Boy Scout type of preparedness that makes people nervous. Put it this way – I have a document that shows what I have bought every extended family member for Christmas and birthday since 2004. I have bought and wrapped all my Christmas presents for this year. I have to hide them from visitors so they don’t back out of our house in fear. Anyway, as you can imagine, the thought of motherhood led to a whole other level of groundwork – I wanted to be ready for every possible issue and situation. Yes, I am well aware of the ridiculousness of that – I even knew it at the time but COULD NOT STOP. So I asked all my far more experienced and knowledgeable friends to answer a few questions for me. Some of them were helpful, some of them made me want to cry. If I was looking for the definitive list of answers to parenting, all the questions showed was that for as many mothers I knew, there were as many opinions. For better or worse, here is part 1 of the results. Part 2 and 3 later in the week and sometime in the near future I will post THE baby buying spreadsheet – hold on to your hats.
14
Oct
2009
Why I am not a multi-millionaire
I only recently discovered what used to be called the Baa Baa Blind and is now called the Gro Anywhere Blind. Brilliant idea – if I had thought of that instead of fiddling around at uni and stuff, I would be multi-millionaire now and enjoying the calming atmosphere of my Philippe Stark accessorised home, instead of the shrine to Ikea I find myself living in. Not that I am bagging Ikea, I LOVE Ikea. I come up with excuses to drive out there at least once a fortnight. Still – if you had told me when I was buying my first Billy when I was 19 that I would still be buying them when I was 30-something (the fight about whether I am in my early or mid 30s will continue until I am in my 40s), I would have laughed scornfully. I can do a good scornful laugh too – ask my family. And if you don’t know what a Billy is, shame on you. Or perhaps good on you for not wasting your time at uni and inventing the Baa Baa Blind. Or the internet or something. I should do a whole post on Ikea. That way I would not waste time when I am supposed to be commenting on the Baa Baa Blind. Anyway. The blind. 
It has annoying little sheep all over it because most people need to be reminded they are in a nursery – the cot, the change table and the mountains of hideous plastic toys not being a dead giveaway – but it does what it is supposed to. Blocks out all the light. And is stuck up with suction caps so you can TAKE IT WITH YOU. Or take it down when your child no longer needs to conform to Gina Ford darkness dictats. And then put it back up when the clocks change and your child is getting up at 5am and if they don’t start sleeping in you will murder them with an axe go a bit crazy. Anyway – great idea. I have bought one for home/travel and a couple for friends. This is where you can buy them from in the UK , and here for Australia, but they seem to sell them lots of places online around the world. Google it on the internet. You probably invented it so you should know how.
6
Aug
2009
Wall Stickers – Decorating the Nursery, Low Maintenance Style
I was eagerly awaiting the legendary nesting stage in the late stages of my pregnancy to see myself transformed into a fabulously feminine and motivated domestic goddess type person but instead of a full butterfly like transformation I experienced a small fluttering of domesticity by way of an urge to buy stuff. Which I am pretty sure was there before. But this time it was, at least, an urge to buy stuff for the transformation of the office like spare room into something more like a babies room. I say it was a nesting urge nonetheless. Yay. I am woman.
This urge to decorate the nursery resulted in trying out wall stickers. My perception of wall stickers before my personal venture into this entirely new world was that they were the kind of not very cool thing people who also knit “there´s no place like home” wall hangings and embroider doiles might use to “brighten up a room” by, say, creating borders and floral features on walls with stencils. Naturally the pervayers of these wall stickers would also be into lavender and purple in general. However, I have discovered wall stickers (or decals) are part of a whole world of very cool designs and interior decorating. For me it’s turned out to be one of those things that until you’d heard about them, well you hadn’t heard about them… and then when you start looking into it you wonder how you could have missed it. There are a LOT of sites where you can buy wall stickers (or decals) and the amount of choice online means you can find far more interesting designs than cheesy kids cartoons – which are the wall stickers you tend to see more of in your average home decorating store collection – if you can find one at all.
