mum2be useful information and tips

During my pregnancy about 2 years ago even though there were many useful information out there, they appeared to be all over the place so this was the motivation for putting together a quick summary of useful information, tips and apps on pregnancy that particularly helped me during this important, exciting and sometimes daunting period hopefully this post would be useful to another mum-to-be.

Pregnancy Apps

Below are highly recommended and FREE pregnancy apps on iphone and Andriod most of which were useful for various purposes during MY OWN pregnancy:

Pregnancy sprout

This physician-recommended app displays essential newborn advice, checklists and journaling options, and stunning images. Personalize your pregnancy timeline with a due date countdown and customizable info on your baby’s kicks! You can also post content to Facebook for excited family members and friends to see. Pregnancy Sprout also gives you fresh daily content from Parents magazine.

Baby Names

According to The Washington Post, the most popular baby names for 2013 were Noah and Sophia. If you’re still searching for names, you might want to study the 30,000 names in the Baby Names app. This app will give you name origin, annual popularity (who knew that 20,000 Ethans were born in 2008?), pronunciation, and more. There are even sharing features so you can poll your friends via email and Facebook. The name generator concocts the names that go best with parent names.

My Pregnancy Center

Wondering where your kids are and what they’re doing doesn’t start when they become teenagers. It begins in the womb. With the My Pregnancy Today app, all of your pregnancy questions are answered by other moms in the Birth Club and through videos and nutrition guides. You can also get a better understanding of your pregnancy by using the calendar function and tracking your baby’s movements. Use the growth widget to help visualize where your child is in development. This is a very helpful tool for the mindful mother.

Gerber Pregnancy Calendar

When you’re pregnant, your body is changing in new and unexpected ways. Keep up with what’s going on with the Gerber Pregnancy Calendar. You can track doctor appointments, upload ultrasound images, and record audio of your baby’s heartbeat. It will even help you satisfy those strange cravings. Do you want something tangy today? Maybe something creamy? Or crunchy? Gerber will recommend the most fitting and healthy snack with their Snack Finder. This app makes it easy to count down the days until baby’s arrival.

My due date club

The Due Date Club App connects mums-to-be with similar due dates, so they can give their babies the best start in life.Being pregnant can be a joyful and exciting experience that mums-to-be want to share with each other. The Due Date Club app provides a platform for you to make your own community and share advice, questions and go on this journey together.

You can find and chat to other mums-to-be nearby with similar interests and even see, plan and share local events where you can get together.

Mum to be essentials

New born Baby Essentials
This list is not exhaustive and would vary depending on personal preferences and budget. One useful tip from my experience is as a first option Amazon is the place to get the most reasonably priced and good quality  baby items usually with free delivery if you have Amazon prime. I purchased my Moses basket, baby bath, towel,cellular blankets etc from Amazon.

1. Moses basket with fitted sheets and stand- used this for first 5 months although some babies outgrow much quicker in which case crib is preferred
2.  Baby crib if preferred
3. Room thermometer
4. Baby bath- bought two but the most practical one is the tippitoes as it literally frees your hand and makes the experience very easy and secure for the baby as well
5. Changing mat
6. Changing bag
7. Baby hat and Mitts
8. Baby pram and push chair
9. 4 newborn sleep suits
10.  4 newborn cotton body suits (newborn/0-3 months)
11. 4 newborn body vests (newborn/0-3 months)
12. Baby car seat- cybex aton  and car seat adaptor
13. Baby Towel
14. Nursery dresser
15. Cellular blankets
16. Feeding Bottles x 6- philipps Avent 
17. Baby coat and cardigan
18. Baby shawl
19. Fleece blanket for extra warmth
20. Socks x 6
21. Baby dummy/ Teeter
22. Bibs x 8
23. Pampers Newborn Nappies
24. Baby Wipes
25. Large Cotton wool pleats/pads
26. Muslin cloths x 10
27. Olive oil/Johnson baby oil
28. Baby lotion
29. Electric steriliser
30. baby bjorn carrier
31. sleep growbags
32. Carbon monoxide detector
33. Angelcare nappy bin/sacks- i purchased the angelcare
34. Playmat
35. Baby bouncer- got the baby to toddler 3-in-1 bouncer as it said the baby could use until 2 years my son is super active so he easily outgrew this within 9 months
36. Baby monitor
37. Bath thermometer – I didn’t use this as my elbow was sufficient to determine suitable heat level
38. Flask- i had 2 a small for short outings and a bigger one
39. Baby Nappy cream- Sudocream was very effective

For Mum

1.    breast pads
2. disposable hospital pants
3. Nipple cream
4. Nipple shield
5. nursing bras x 4
6. Rocking chair
7. Breast pump
8. Breastfeeding support pillow

From crawlers to 2 years

1.  Stairs Safety gate
2.  Cot bed, mattress and bumper set
3.  High chair
4.  potty

Useful information

1. NCT courses- prenatal and postnatal courses
2. Pregnancy yoga- check your local area for available classes you can also ask our midwife to provide this information
3. NHS Information Service for Parents- This is by far the most trusted place to get useful information on pregnancy and until baby is 18 months
4. Baby Show- these are very good events to attend as you get expert information and one-stop shop for most retailers with discounts on several items purchased from the fair. Preferably in your second trimester when you’re more likely to still be able to move around a bit easily if you’re like me and was too curious to find out the baby sex that would further help to inform your buying decisions.
5. I found that baby clothing were generally much cheaper in the United States as compared to the United Kingdom or other European countries e.g Sweden and France hence I did majority of my baby cloth shopping in the US considering they would outgrow them very quickly
6. Download the mothercare app to receive £10 off when you spend £50 or more using the app.
7. Mum-to-Be Bounty Pack- One of the free packs your receive from Bounty in hospital or from your midwife after your fist scan containing product samples, money off coupons, helpful advice and useful information on pregnancy
8. NHS Maternity Exemption certificate- Pregnant women and those who have had a baby in the last 12 months get the certificate free and can be used to receive free NHS prescription, dental treatment during the validity period. Ask your midwife to provide the required forms.

The ups of a techy mom2be

So I havent been writing actively in this blog for over a year now mainly because other more "important" inevitable priorities seemed to have taken over, one thing I'm pretty glad to have put aside since last year is coding and endless debugging just thinking about one time when I desperately tried setting up flexunit to run on headless CI hudson unix server to no avail even though it was working sucessfully on my local dev environment makes me cringe slightly now.
[artifact:mvn] [ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[artifact:mvn] [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[artifact:mvn] [INFO] Failed to launch Flash Player.  Probably java was not able to find flashplayer.
[artifact:mvn]   Make sure flashplayer is available on PATH
[artifact:mvn]   or use -DflashPlayer.command=${flashplayer executable}

Well, my sole interests apart from my "fluffy" functional analysis daytime work consist of activities such as attending baby shows, parenting classes, prenatal yoga, decorating nursery, and more recently packing hospital bag- wish there was an app that could decide what you really need based on your lifestyle and personality or maybe there is already? Although to be fair there are loads of creative and useful apps out there some of which are free (atleast as at the time i got them) such as sprout, mypregnancy, pregnancy tracker and duedateclub which has undoubtedly helped the long journey to motherhood. These pregnancy apps provide recommended health tips and pregancy advice, checklists to keep you organized and handy tools to track your weight, baby kicks and contractions, now wish i was being paid to sell those apps.


There are some advantages to being pregnant, and I’m not talking about the adorable bundle of joy you eventually get out of the deal. For the six months or so that you are visibly pregnant (or not in my case being that my bump never got too big), that belly is like a free spin, the wild card, a “get out of jail free” card. Pregnancy i must say isn't a bed of roses particularly for full-time working ladies even for those of us that are quite fortunate not to have experienced much dificulties during the first trimester and beyond nevertheless i should highlight some associated few perks:

• You can get through the crowds- My baby on board  badge which usually guarantees me a seat on the approx 1 hour train commute from home to work and vice-versa makes me sometimes feel like i can path the red sea. Of cause if you were Kate Middleton for example, you certainly wont need the badge in the first place.

• Free food. For some reason, people are quite concerned about pregnant women getting enough to eat, so it’s not that uncommon that family and friends might start handing you cooked food, fruits and snacks and additionally in my case the servers in my office start throwing in extras with your food order. I also experienced family members loading extra food on my plate at family functions with the words "you're eating for two(or three")
• Being able to work from home remotely to attend my antenatal classes or just when I feel too tired going into the office
• Network of other supportive and positive-minded moms2be if you manage to engage in activities such as prenatal yoga classes, mums clubs, parenting classes etc
• You get help at the grocery store- These days  particularly at the end of my pregnancy the staff at my local grocery asda are always very keen to pack my shopping bags or reach out to a top shelf to grab an item for me. Going forward I will  make it a point to help other pregnant woman in a similar situation.
• Everyone knows there’s an unwritten rule when it comes to pregnant women and the restroom – let her go first.

Reflecting on some of these few advantages almost makes me feel like i could want to get pregnant again at some point, of cause my husband must not hear this now:p When the baby(ies) is stuck in your ribs, you're struggling to sleep at night going through all the apps (facebook) and games on your phone which would seem boring at that time and waddle is making you wince and gnash your teeth, remember these perks.

iPAD, another overpriced gadget or “craptop”?

I recently got an ipad after deciding I couldn’t wait any longer till Q12011 or whenever the next version was due to be released given that I quite like to stay on top of the latest technology trends. I was in NY sometime last June close to the time when the device first came out and could see the massive queues of people standing in line outside apple store on 5th Avenue in hot scorching sun. I was actually tempted then to join the queue but decided to spend time researching how functional it was before i got mine.  I had to justify good enough reasons for getting one considering I already had an iPod and iphone4. The question was, what can the ipad do that the iphone/ipod touch can’t do minus the bigger screen?

The iPad to me is a huge iphone/ipod touch that also runs a really decent word processing app, a nice reading app plus will run several other interesting apps such as marvel comic, WondLa, dropbox and also runs media both audio and video via itunes. The ipad is very elegant to use indeed, the experience of watching movies on it is arguably magical. Even though huge amount of time and effort is spent converting videos to ipad format, the media experience you get is usually worth it in the end. 

I also enjoy reading on it which is a plus for me cause have always struggled reading on any type of screen (except maybe kindle) for long periods, ipad is able to access kindle and ipad books which is great. Although, I’m really wondering why the first version didn’t just have a camera with built-in mic for video conferencing on gtalk or skype and maybe facetime to make it truly revolutionary except of cause Apple wants people to stand in line yet again when the next version is released.  Now thinking about that, it might look pretty funny and ridiculous trying to use an ipad to take a photo or placing on your ears to make a call.

Furthermore, its really not a writing device as its obviously clear that any form of fast typing is a secondary function for the ipad which would certainly have been useless in the "mad men" secretary era. Surfing the web was meant to be a major justification if only adobe flash player and java could be installed on it to run 60% of sites I usually visit such as dbrasweb.

Mine has both wifi and 3G which is meant to work anywhere O2 covers which again is most likely not as "anywhere" as you might think. I’m going away to France next weekend and will see how the 3G would work whilst there as a POC.

One thing the ipad certainly won’t allow you is FREEDOM. Its such a hassle that its not a standalone by itself since you still need a PC with iTunes and wifi to manage and get anything on it. Plus the 1 inch black space around the screen that just wasted away that should have been an addition to the 9.7 by 7 inch screen was a huge error i-think.  Although to be fair on the former, Apple’s reasoning could be that if the device crashes then it would be certain that you didn’t break it yourself since its not hackable (arguable) so there won’t be any questions handing you a new one.

The iPad doesn't allow for doing more than one thing at a time, maybe because people are more productive when focused on one thing at a time although missing features such as multi tasking and wireless printing are meant to be included in upcoming OS 4.0 upgrade definitely have a device which provides comprehensive interactive functionality is pretty nice especially on the short commute to work.

Maybe not quite revolutionary or groundbreaking, the ipad is definitely a useful device. It may not "replace" a computer as of yet, but it will replace carrying one around often. My ipad doesn’t get hot even after 7 straight hours of using it for running epicurious app as a replacement for my hard copy "mastering the art of French cooking" cookbook.  Still trying to find a decent way to dock the device into the wall in the kitchen right at eye level.  As for me, a proper buy in would be when Apple is able to invent a device i can control with my mind assuming am too lazy to lift my finger to any a device ;).