Bed Rest Again and Finally Bought Stuff

I'm on bed rest due to rather annoying lower backache. What started out as a painful giggle at the trapped nerve in my arse has now become a persistent back pain that had me a bit worried this morning. It didn't stop me from dragging my arse out of bed and going to work, but I spoke to the midwife when I was minutes away from the office and explained the pain (combined with irritable bladder) and she bollocked me for going to work. Nothing is showing in initial tests but my results will be back in the next few days. At least I know that I am NOT in labour although it turns out that I have been having Braxton Hicks. They monitored the bambino for twenty minutes by hooking us up to fetal monitor which also drew the movements. The bambino kicked from the moment they strapped up the bump to the moment they took it off. The midwife looked at the graph and said "Gosh your baby moves a LOT!" You're frigging telling me! She doesn't get woken up in early in the morning by her!

I have ordered the pushchair and carrycot which turns it into a pram (yay!), carseat and base, plus the baby carrier. Babies suck up money before they ever suck milk out of your nipple....

I brought a Quinny Buzz Pushchair with Dreami carrycot for £389 instead of £464 after a lot of time spent searching the crap out of the internet. I only managed to save £20 on the Maxi-Cosi carseat and Easybase but it's still better than forking out on the high street. Oh and I own a steriliser...jaysus!

The bambino is gathering together a lovely wardrobe which I must talk about in my next post. Today she was given the gift of cashmere by her uncle...

OK must go now as my boobs feel like they are on fire.....

Under pressure, but at least I'm making decisions!

Jaysus I have just under 7 weeks to go and everything is seeming very real. I am getting it on both sides now as my ma and the boyf's mum are asking me loads of questions and pushing me into the decision zone.

"Have you decided on the pushchair?"
"Well you see....."

"And the cot?"
"Mmmm, yes we are going to get one. Just don't know which one yet....."

"Steriliser?"
"I think I'm getting one of those Avent electric sterilisers for about forty quid and I'll get an electric breast pump too."
"Don't they have sterilising tablets anymore?" Cue tumbleweeds as I stare at her blankly.
"Is that something you put in the microwave?"
"Maybe they don't have those anymore....It might be more 1972...."
I of course snickered. "Well a lot of things have changed since then...." I added.

And the questions went on and on and on and on... They mean well but it's booming in like crunch time.

After all of the panic about the pushchair and reading countless reviews and testing and eliminating, I am back to my original first choice, the Quinny Buzz pushchair with Dreami Carrycot and a Mama's and Papa's Pilko Pramette . I'm leaning towards the Quinny but considering all of the pallava I have been through considering that it was my first choice, I will have one last test of the Pilko in the next couple of days. I budgeted for about £500 and the Quinny will be about £375 (It should be £469) and I might be able to get the Pilko for about £250 (RRP 300).

I have also decided on the car seat (Maxi Cosi Cabriofix) plus an Easybase so that we don't f*ck up the installation (all together should cost £170, will probably cost £144). I still have no clue about the cot, but that's my next task....

I have managed to make decisions about nursing bras (trusty Marks and Spencers), which are funny looking things, the baby carrier (Baby Bjorn Active Carrier) and have done at least half of the baby shower list. I set it up with My Registry which enables me to put the list together from lots of stores and people can mark what has been bought like a traditional registry list. I have lied to both of the mothers and said that I have done the guest list for the shower but I will get this done in the next few days as I need to send the invite, and to top everything off, I have put together a budget spreadsheet.

I feel tired just reading what I have typed....

Catch Up

I had this vision that I'd be winding down in the run up to going on maternity leave mid-April but instead I am running around like a blue arsed fly. It's at times like this when I realise that it pays to be one of those anal retentive organised people because the next 8 weeks till the bambino arrives (that's if she doesn't arrive early) are going to be so hectic.

I have 4 weeks left of work so I have lots of meetings to go to (I take the piss about the amount of internal meetings I attend but I actually have lots of external ones too), I need to get up to date with all of my accounts, do handovers and clear my backlog of things that I always intend to do but haven't got around to, otherwise known as a To-Do List.

I've started organising my baby registry list but haven't remembered to sort out the guestlist, but I am meeting with a couple of friends at the weekend and hopefully it can all get sorted. I have had moments where I have gotten pissy about this whole baby shower mallarky. I know it's all well intentioned but combined with the shitload of things I have to do, it feels like Yet Another Thing. When I agreed to one, I just didn't think about what I would need to do in order for it to happen and I wish I had because I would have been more organised... Ah coulda, woulda, shoula....

After thinking that we had made up our minds about our pushchair, I have backtracked and now have to spend almost every day reading reviews and product tests to try to get to grips with what is out there. It is truly mind boggling and it's clear that people buy different pushchairs for different reasons, regardless of whether it's considered to be technically good or sh*t. Our original choice, the Quinny Buzz, we love the look and feel of, but in hindsight there are some potential practicality issues and on this occasion, size does matter. Not only will I be a user of public transport, but we are off to the US at the end of August and need to feel like we can travel with a relatively light pushchair and not have to weigh ourselves down. Some people love the Quinny Buzz, others hate it, and I'm torn on elements of it. But for something that costs almost £500 if you buy the whole frigging lot, I need to love it...

We've changed hospitals as we liked the very positive things that were said about the new place, plus we even brought more baby clothes today. We had a day off and popped up to Peter Jones in Knightsbridge and got lots of basic white stuff for the bambino's arrival. Due to the paranoia about the possibility of the bambino being a boy, we have stuck with neutral stuff.

On top of all of this, we are researching stuff for the new house, dealing with the paperwork and headaches of moving, trying to pack up stuff in the flat so it doesn't creep up on us, decluttering yet again for the charity shop, and trying to ensure that we spend quality time together. Oh and of course I am trying to blog, plus tooling around with a few web projects. Oh and how could I forget reading about breastfeeding and birthplans....

Everyday I feel different about the breastfeeding - some days confident, but since starting to read about it, more often than not, anxious...but that's whole other post.

8 weeks to go.....scary flipping stuff!

The Chosen Pushchair - Quinny Buzz

I'm pretty sure we've chosen our pushchair. It's the Quinny Buzz which we'll buy as a travel system with the Dreami Carrycot and a Maxi-Cosi car seat. It comes in a few different colours but we haven't decided what colour we'll go with yet.

I thought it would take us a lot longer to research but because we were looking for a travel system, it narrowed down the search to just a few brands. I'll post about the other travel systems that we looked at (Bugaboo, Mamas and Papas, Micralite) on a separate post.

As we'll be using a mixture of public transport, walking and driving it makes sense for us to buy something that caters to everything and whilst it is slightly bigger than we had hoped at 12.8kg, it has a lot of features that resonate well with us, such as a front and rear facing pushchair (pictured) which can also be angled to different positions. It unfolds automatically at a touch (it can be locked too) and the wheels are gas something-or-other so they're great for when you coming off or going onto trains, although bus drivers may not like it so much! It manouvers really well and it's a very smooth experience. We'll use it from when the bambino is 6 months old.

The pram is really cute and the hood of it has a handle incorporated in it which helps with when you take it off the frame. It comes with adaptors which can be fixed to the frame for when you want to set it up as a pram. When we tried to figure out how to do this without a demonstration, the boyf faffed around for a while with it, not realising that there were adaptors. We were very pleased with ourselves when we saw it attached to the frame but quicklybecame nervous at how wobbly it seemed, and then a woman walked by and it fell off! Fortunately it's not complex to set it up as a pram but it doesn't come off easily either. Apparently people use the carrycot as a moses basket as well, but I don't think we'll do that. It's nice to know that we have the option though!


The Maxi-Cosi car seat will be mostly used in the car but we can use it for taking the bambino on short jaunts in it by using it as a pushchair. Apparently they should only be in it for no more than two hours a day though. Maxi-Cosi is also supposed to be the best car seat brand so we feel we've really lucked out by finding the Quinny Buzz travel system.

It doesn't come cheap though! It's supposed to retail for around £500 (close to $1000) but we will buy ours online or wherever we get the best deal. Annoyingly there was a fantastic deal on where we could have got it for just under £400 on one website, but for the sake of our sanity and space, we aren't planning to get the pushchair till we move/month before baby due. I am monitoring prices because if something really good comes up again, we'll just go for it.