Nursery & car seat

We picked up the car seat from Mum's today (at the same time as the chest of drawers and mirror). It's ace! We went for the Maxi-Cosi Cabriofix in deep red. This is the one that goes with the Stokke (which is also in Red) as part of the travel system so luckily our choice was limited! There are soooooooooooo many car seats & base unit things. Decisions aren't my forte at the moment.

We've painted the nursery! Finally. Painting skirting boards is my least favourite job, officially. It's so fiddly, especially around radiator pipes & when there's carpet - bleh. Anyhoo, we've done it now & we really love it. The worst part of the prep work was getting the effing border off. Who sticks a border onto woodchip?? In this day and age? Seriously. We managed to get most of it off and the glue that was too stubborn, we left and painted over. I suppose the woodchip was a bit of a saving grace (I can't believe I said that) as the glue remnants look like part of it when painted over! Wooh! Score.

These are the colours we've gone for:

Door = hideous

I know the door is hideous. We have plans to change all the doors in our house, but there are 13 so that's an ongoing project on the back burner for now. I took the photo above this way because if I took it facing the window it distorts the colours. I took one facing the window anyway so you can see more of the room:

Dubious phone pano

So now you get the gist of the room; the carpet is a chocolate brown. It's not the biggest, but babies are small! We have some pictures (donated by Mum from her house - Mickey Mouse limited edition paintings - thank you!) to put up and a mirror that goes with the chest of drawers. The cot is coming some time in July I think. We have the mattress already.

We're still um-ing and ah-ing about curtains and the light. We have a blackout blind so the fabric isn't too much of an issue. We were going to have an Alfie set as there is a changing mat too and it would be nice to have some matching stuff, but having painted the room I don't think it would go. Then we saw this but decided it'd be too much white. We quite liked these, but think it would be green overkill. There are loads of really funky nursery sets at Walmart, so bright & colourful. What is this English obsession with pastel, pale colours for babies? It's INFURIATING! I decided to have a look on the Ikea website on the off chance, they usually have some good kid's textiles. This is what we found for curtains, and we're still struggling with the light. This is by far the most challenging room decoration project ever. Even looking at the Ikea curtains again I'm not sure they'd look right; maybe if the walls were white instead of the colour they are. Hmm. Perhaps Alfie wouldn't look so bad after all??! My god this is getting out of control...enough.

Birth pool

We booked the birth pool today! It's all becoming alarmingly real. It arrives on 1st August & goes back on 8th September. 5 week hire for £340, not bad. We went with Aquabirth - Fiona, the woman who runs it is lovely and very understanding. She said that if Wiggler is late, it's more important that we have her/him rather than worrying about returning the pool so to tell her & she'll jiggle her pools from her end. How nice is that?!

Still, getting quite scared now.

*Think happy thoughts, don't get freaked out because it'll make it worse*

Baby clothes :-)

We bought our first baby clothes today! Well, technically the first piece we bought was in New York - an I <3 NY bodysuit - it's so dinky. Hope it'll fit, if only for a few days.

Anyhoo...we were at B&Q getting paint etc for the nursery & saw that Sainsbury's had 25% off all clothing. So we went in to see what they had. I'm glad we did because we got about 20 things for £20! Bargain! They range from newborn to 3-6 months. We bought some lovely Winnie-the-pooh bodysuits, plain white ones and patterned with a bear/stripes etc; some sleep suits with stripes/numbers on and a plain one and also bought a Winnie-the-pooh sleeping bag.

There are some really lovely unisex things on the Mothercare website. We've set up a gift list to keep track of things we like :-). A lot of places really are quite rubbish for unisex; it's all pink for girls & blue for boys. Adams Kids is the worst! H&M have some awesome little t-shirts for babies. Will be going back there when we need to get some more stuff.

Travelling while pregnant

We're back from the States now. We had a fabulous time, except in NYC where it rained pretty much the whole week :-( I'm glad we went; I feel refreshed having not been at home/work for 3 weeks, but if the situation presents itself again I wouldn't repeat the experience. We did a phenomenal amount of walking which, had I not been pregnant as was the trajectory when said holiday was booked, would've been fine. However, the amount of walking we we did meant that I was so very tired for the last week while we were in Washington DC. Normally I'd have been fine, but I was ready to come home by 11th May, which is a shame because DC is a really nice city - so spacious & clean. It's easily walkable, which is just as well as the metro stops are quite far apart compared with Boston and NYC.

I found it frustrating that I was ready to be back "home" in the hotel by early evening. Usually I'd have liked to stay out and seen the night-life, but I was ready for bed by about 8pm! I think Simon found it frustrating too because he didn't have anyone to go out with like he does at home.

I also did a really stupid thing - I booked our train tickets for April instead of May. Luckily the nice man at Boston South Station realised it was a genuine mistake and refunded the whole amount. We actually ended up getting a bus which was a fraction of the price of the train ($17 each for a single trip from Boston to NYC & the same for NYC to DC). I was so cross with myself and can't help thinking that it wouldn't have happened if I weren't pregnant with pregnancy dementia.

So, if you're going to go on holiday while you're pregnant, do it before you get to 25 weeks, get someone else to check your reservations before you make them and go sit on a beach!

Stokke!!!

So...we're in Boston right now...wandering around somewhat aimlessly and we stumble upon a maternity store. Inside said maternity store is none other than a Stokke Xplory! WOOOOOOOH! We knew we'd like one for Pie mini, but didn't know where to see one "in the flesh" to have a go and a play. We certainly didn't expect to find one in Boston of all places. Anyhoo, we are now decided on the Xplory. It's such a smooth ride and so much higher than regular push chairs. It's also LOADS slimmer than other ones which is great. So we are now decided that this is the travel system/thing for us and most grateful that Mum has very generously said she'll buy it for us.

I didn't realise how pushing something that big would affect me. When you're walking down the street it's just you, your bag and your personal space in front of you. When I was test driving the Xplory it felt so weird. My personal space was totally massive and it was a bit daunting. I suppose I thought it would be a little like pushing a trolley, but no. Nothing like it. When you're in the supermarket, everyone has a trolley. Not everyone has a huge multicoloured thing with a baby in it. Hmm. We'll see how this progresses. It reminded me of an article I read online a few weeks ago about the first time you go out with your new baby alone. It hadn't even occurred to me that this might be weird. Can't really comment on that yet though.