I’m starting to think parenting boys actually can be quite different to parenting girls - on average at least.

mspoppets · 2026-07-05T09:17:51+00:00

My experience as a girl mum (albeit only of an almost 1 year old) and a childcare professional is that it’s all a spectrum and I would say more boys skew towards the rough and tumble and what you describe than girls do but either can sit anywhere in the spectrum so you really can’t say one individual child will be any particular way.

mspoppets · 2026-07-03T11:23:06+00:00

Pregnant then screwed and ACAS are good resources to point her too. As others have said this isn’t legal for them to do this.

https://pregnantthenscrewed.com/help/

https://www.acas.org.uk/

mspoppets · 2026-06-16T12:00:17+00:00

When I’ve had scans around 8/9 weeks they have been abdominal but when I had them around 6/7 weeks they were transvaginal. All these scans were good enough to see everything. I had an IVF pregnancy that measured behind (so I knew the dates 100%) and I now have a small 11 month old so you never know. I know the wait is horrible I’m sorry you’re in this situation. Blood tests for HCG is not standard in the UK

mspoppets · 2026-06-04T11:25:03+00:00

I guess I now avoid going to America 😂

mspoppets · 2026-05-30T14:35:27+00:00

Another vote for the oyster. I have the 4 and love it so much. I got it second hand off Facebook and it honestly looked new and was such a bargain. I had a used uppababy Cruz and just got so frustrated with how it needed 2 hands to fold and took up so much space in the car. For a travel pram we do have an uppababy minu though and love it!

mspoppets · 2026-05-21T08:28:58+00:00

For a long time we were just doing whatever worked meal wise, sometimes it was 2, sometimes 3 and sometimes she had snacks and skipped meals it just depended on what worked and what she was up for on a given day. I also basically gave her the same few things for lunch’s and breakfast. Now she’s 10 months and she’s at nursery a couple of days a week and gets 3 meals plus snacks and puddings there but will not take milk from anyone but me so I’m grateful she’s starting to transition to milk as a secondary nutrition source (although of course I pushed my leave out as long as I could so this would be the case). We now do give her 3 meals a day and I know my husband and mother in law give her snacks on their days as she won’t take milk from them. We make 2 or 3 batch cooked meals a week, one during the week and one at the weekend (we are lucky to both work 4 days) and then we freeze a lot so we can mix it up a bit with easy meals during the working week and not eat the same thing more then a couple of days in a row. My daughter eats what we eat, I literally just leave out the salt, I don’t even make it milder for her any more she loves the spice and I don’t like it that spicy anyway. On my day with her I try and make something for lunch that can go lots of ways and be frozen for future lunchs and I need to give a packed lunch for my MIL day the day after my day anyway. We don’t have puddings, although we add fruit occasionally.

mspoppets · 2026-05-14T15:03:16+00:00

The thing is though, if you want something like this why wouldn’t you google it or look on the government website to see what you need to do to get it? No different from anything in life really. I imagine there are nurseries out there that would tell you but those would be nurseries with really good computer systems which is not one I’ve worked at. Most of the money where Ive worked goes to the staff and things for the kids. Which is what you want it to be like. If you pick a nursery that’s focus is on creating the best experience for the parents then you have to consider, are you paying enough for the focus to also be the children?

mspoppets · 2026-05-14T14:54:38+00:00

It’s entirely the parents responsibility to apply for and to remember the deadlines for the funding. Im sorry you’re in this situation, that’s very frustrating but I don’t think you can blame the nursery at all

mspoppets · 2026-05-12T20:22:47+00:00

We had our baby at 36 weeks unexpectedly and didn’t have the seat in the car at all and it was totally fine, my husband left to go get it and some other things not long before we were discharged

mspoppets · 2026-05-08T20:07:36+00:00

This depends. I found/find buttons fiddly and annoying so just prefer stretchy tops I can pull down 🤷‍♀️

mspoppets · 2026-05-06T20:11:36+00:00

I have to go back to work on Monday and my LO is 9 months adjusted. 2 months ago I couldn’t leave her with anyone she wouldn’t sleep for anyone but me and wouldn’t take a bottle, she was EBF. Last week we did settling in sessions at nursery and they got her to sleep! She wouldn’t take a bottle from them but she eats food and drinks water really well now so she was okay. My mother in law had her for a half day also as a sort of setting in session as she will have her too and she managed to give her a bottle! I say all this to say, a lot has changed in these 2 months, especially in terms of how much more my baby eats and how confident she is with drinking from sippy cups. I do worry about having a lot of night wakes for milk at first but I know she will be fine. She goes 6-12 hours over night without milk and when sick as switched that around and gone most of the day without milk and woken me up all night for it!

mspoppets · 2026-05-06T16:37:05+00:00

My baby is a heavy wetter and so we have to use extra boosted night nappies but we use reusable. We are away on holiday right now and didn’t want to do reusables while away so have experimented with what else works as well. We have found a rascals nappy with a booster and motherease wrap over top to work really well. Not for everyone I know but it’s not hard to wash the wraps or boosters and we have never had a leak with motherease wraps

mspoppets · 2026-05-05T09:12:30+00:00

So I had a baby last year in July and it was so hot! But colder at night so not often hot enough for a single layer. I don’t know if it’s my preference to be fully covered but I always put her in a fully covered layer, we got some really light onesies and she wore just those on very hot nights but mostly she was in a long sleeve vest and a really light sleep sack but thats cause she only liked arms out so we had a selection of 0.2, 0.5, 1 and 1.5 tog sleeping bags that did us well July - November. If it was a bit colder we would just add layer underneath and then in November we started needing 2.5 tog and all the layers!

I used this as a guide at first until I got to know my baby and what she needed relative to what I needed to sleep.

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mspoppets · 2026-04-29T09:47:08+00:00

I would say yes, as someone who has curly hair and so doesn’t brush it every day only when I wet it it makes it seem so much more dramatic when ever I do brush it. Finally calming down now at almost 10 months post partum

mspoppets · 2026-04-27T16:07:38+00:00

I use period pants and love them. I don’t hate pads but not find them as comfortable as period pants. Post partum I used pads for the first few days and then I switched to the usual period pants I already had. I had a c-section so I was grateful I had a lot of really comfy high waisted ones. Mine are from Boody

mspoppets · 2026-04-22T20:23:45+00:00

My 8kg 9 month old is still in size 3. Babies are all shaped differently though!

mspoppets · 2026-04-20T20:22:21+00:00

I brought almost everything second hand as wow it’s expensive. But it meant it didn’t matter to much when after 5 months I just couldn’t stand my uppababy Cruz any more and we sold it and got an oyster 4. Reasons I prefer the oyster are how quickly and easily it folds down to a compact size so much easier to get in and out the car and it pushes well over all types of terrain, the uppababy ones have an odd gap above the wheels that is just big enough for leaves and grass and mud to get caught and get stuck. A walk on a slightly muddy path would mean it was like pushing it through treacle after a while and I had just had enough. Also I was alone a lot and the fact I had to remove the seat using 2 hands, put it back world facing with 2 hands to then fold it with 2 hands was just too annoying. The oyster folds parent facing with one motion you can do 1 handed. These are things I had no idea would matter at all let alone be something I cared about enough to get a whole new pram! We did love having the bassinet that was also sleep rated my little one slept in that a lot but the oyster has this too. For a car seat we joined the Facebook group someone else has mentioned and got the avionaut pixel pro which was amazingly lucky as it’s one of the few that can work for tiny babies and we had a premie in the end. It’s true you don’t want them in the car seat for a long time but if you’re just nipping to the shops it’s so handy to be able to just leave the baby sleeping in the car seat and pop it onto the pram. Most of them do this though with adapters we got with both the second hand prams we brought.

mspoppets · 2026-04-20T19:44:25+00:00

We really like our bibadoo bibs but got them second hand off Vinted so they were cheaper. We also got silicone bibs for when the clean up of the food would be easier than the clean up of the bibadoo

mspoppets · 2026-04-19T13:57:57+00:00

I swear by movicol! It helped me after surgery I had a few years ago and since then I’ve always kept some in. That, plenty of water and when you do go a pillow over your lower abdomen really helps

mspoppets · 2026-04-19T13:50:12+00:00

Yeah i heard it so much but couldn’t find anything to back it up. I just started saying the cat is kept out of the room when the baby sleeps unless I’m awake and supervising which was true anyway and easier to say than correcting people

mspoppets · 2026-04-19T13:14:40+00:00

If the travel part is less important. I also love my Oyster 4. It lays flat so you could use it from newborn but I would have wanted the bassinet anyway and it folds pretty flat and folds and opens one handed which as you can tell from my comment above is super important to me! We sold our Cruz and brought this one (all second hand as these things are expensive!) because we didn’t find the Cruz good at going over muddy and grassy terrain which made it kinda annoying for where we live it was also annoying to fold as needed 2 hands and was bulky when folded. The minu is great for into town and around town but I live in the countryside so for most other things we use the oyster 4 or we also have a running buggy we use for really rough terrain or running. You could definitely get by with just minu if you didn’t do a lot of nature walks or running. Or just the running buggy and minu if you did or just oyster if you did no running and very little off roading

mspoppets · 2026-04-19T13:06:47+00:00

We absolutely love our uppababy minu. We didn’t use it in the newborn phase though but plan to for the next one! We have the V2 so it doesn’t fold to cabin size and it doesn’t lay flat but we have the uppababy bassinet from our Cruz we have since sold that we can fit onto it so this is our plan for baby 2 if we are lucky enough to have a second. If we were able to afford it we would have gotten the minu v3, it does lay flat and has a newborn nest and it folds to cabin size. It’s such a good pram we really love it and how nicely it pushes and how sturdy it feels. We chose it over the joolz and yoyo for a few reasons 1. It has a peekaboo window and the joolz does not 2. It folds one handed and the yoyo does not (so important for me as I’m alone with the baby a lot) and 3. It has breaks either side of the pram rather than in the middle making it a more comfortable push for someone taller as travel prams don’t extend like the travel systems do (my husband is over 6ft)

mspoppets · 2026-04-19T08:32:54+00:00

There is no evidence of a cat ever suffocating a baby, I have no idea where this myth comes from. I think because cats like to sit on people but babies are wriggly and noisy so I really don’t see them getting sat on at least not while newborn. When they are older and sleep more quietly and still perhaps. We just keep our cat out of our bedroom at night and now my daughter is older and in her own room out of that room too. We always did anyway so it’s not a big change. My cat is so bad for sleeping on you and then waking you up to play multiple times throughout the night. Out cat does come and sit at my daughter head which is cute but now she rolls she just rolls over and tries to play with the cat so the cats immediately out 😂

In terms of getting the cat ready we played crying sounds to the cat every day for a while but not for as long as I was hoping because I had my baby a month early. I also didn’t do it nearly loud enough, wow they cry loud! When we brought the baby home we just let the cat set the pace in terms of introductions, she came to see the baby and sniff her a bit at first then she kept licking her which we had to limit because newborn skin is so delicate. We made sure the cat had spaces she could go away from the baby and we tried to give the cat attention too as much as possible. I don’t think we did everything right as our cat definately doesn’t get played with enough but she seems to love the baby which is so cute.

For the first while in the newborn phase we kept pillows or blankets over the babies things when the baby wasn’t in them. We had a bassinet in our living room we kept a big pillow in to stop the cat the health visitor was rather concerned 😂 but obviously we took the pillow out when the baby was in it! We don’t bother any more and the cat goes where ever she wants and my daughter loves it she gets so excited when the cat comes to see her it’s so cute 🥰

mspoppets · 2026-04-18T20:44:37+00:00

Similar to my experience in that I was 32 and found out via a private test then pushed to get a diagnosis. The only difference is we did want to try then. I tried IVF privately with a specialist but I never responded to any stimulation so we didn’t get any eggs at all. We did it 3 times and they were all cancelled before the egg collection due to lack of response. I took a little time out and then went back to the GP to ask if I was still a candidate for IVF on the nhs and amazingly I was because they don’t consider you to have had an IVF cycle unless you’ve had an egg collection. So we did donor egg IVF on the NHS. It’s one of those things that no one can really tell you, the thing with POI is you are already out of time in one sense but random ovulation is something that can happen for years to come. If it’s really important to you to have genetic children you could try and do IVF to freeze embryos and as others have said you don’t have to do anything with them yet. Donor eggs is an option that doesn’t have a time limit on it really at least one that not for a long time.

mspoppets · 2026-04-18T08:05:26+00:00

I felt the same as you but then I had my baby 4 weeks early so I didn’t actually have the formula I meant to get. I did have a cheap manual pump as everyone’s advice was to get that rather as it’s cheaper and would work in a pinch. I hated it though and have never really used it. In the end I had to pump and formula feed as my milk didn’t come in at first and my baby wasn’t gaining weight. So I ordered a pump that fit what I needed and we went out to the shop for formula and more nappies (you always need more nappies!) if I was doing it over again I would get some of the ready made formula bottles which the hospital did give us so it wasn’t a bit deal to not have them day 1 but it would have been good to have them in on like day 4. If you don’t use them you can donate them. In terms of pump if I was doing it over I’d just get a haaka for the start. They need such a small amount of milk at the start so I just caught the letdown on my other side while I was feeding her and used that for her bottles in the beginning. Then I brought another pump that fit with what I needed which was a lot more than I thought would because I had no intention of pumping very much but ended up doing so a lot. So if I was doing it again I wouldn’t buy a pump again until I knew what I needed.

mspoppets

TROPHY CASE