No, wait! It's a girl!

This morning, eager to demonstrate to Toby Phoebe's ability to predict the gender of our baby, I said, "Tell Daddy what sort of baby we're having. Is it a boy baby or a girl baby?"

And Phoebe yelled, "Girl."

"Oh!" I said, "I thought it was a boy. Would you prefer a boy baby or a girl baby?"

And she said, "Girl."

Just to be sure I said, "Are you sure? You said you wanted a boy yesterday. Are you sure you want a girl baby and not a boy baby?"

"Yep."

Now I'm confused.

In other confusing matters, I'm looking for a baby car seat that will sit on our pram base. I didn't buy one with Phoebe because they are over $300 and it seemed a bit extravagant for something that you only use for a few months when you can hire one for $70. But it's one thing I really wished I'd had and I decided I'd buy one for our next baby, especially as this one will get shunted about a lot more than Phoebe, to and from daycare and other activities. I figure we'd spend $70 anyway and the re-sell value is pretty high on these so it's probably worth it.

I've been looking online to see how cheaply I can get one. I found one in a local shop for about $270. Not the cheapest but I figured maybe I could pick it up and avoid delivery costs, which would make it very competitive. I emailed the shop to find out if this was possible, and if not, what the delivery charge to my suburb would be. This was the reply I got:

We will price match the total of the online order including the freight in store. To pick up, simply make your order online and add in the comment box that you would like to collect from store.
To have it sent, just add your item to the cart and add your delivery details, the cart will quote you the freight.

Say, what? If I'm paying for delivery anyway why on earth would I bother going to the trouble to come to the shop to pick it up? Perhaps if I was homeless. There are two local online stores that seem unable to give me a delivery charge without first taking my credit card details. Call me cynical but this makes me nervous.

Ikea highchair best for baby-led weaning

Or any weaning for that matter. It's so cheap ($50 AUD with tray) and it's just one bit of moulded plastic which makes it really easy to clean. I thought our Fisher Price Booster Seat was simple and easy until I tried one of these. Phoebe can sit up straight and get close to her food unlike other highchairs which often recline a bit too much. You can even put it under the shower to clean it which I did for the first time tonight. And it's the height of fashion. All the cafès have them (presumably because they're so easy to clean), as do most of my friends with babies and those who don't have one want one. Seriously why do people pay through the nose for a padded piece of faff when they could grab something like this? It's yet another example of manufacturers taking advantage of parents who simply want the best for their baby.

I love our IKEA highchair and so does Phoebe. I'm sure she thinks I take it everywhere with us as wherever we are there seems to be one for her to sit in. Now that's where the Fisher Price seat really does come into its own (that and having a tray you can move in towards her to help prevent bits of food ending up on her lap). I always have it in the car in case we go somewhere that doesn't have a high chair. And as Phoebe is one of those babies that generally insists on feeding herself (i.e. messy) we even use it in the park. It's the only way I can get her to sit still whilst eating.

Check out me in my new chair!

I love it this much!

I am an eating machine.
And in other news, Phoebe definitely has a third tooth now, one along from the front right on the top. And she's turned into an Eating Machine. Seriously, today I just could not get enough food into her and she had plenty of breastfeeds too. She woke at 2am, which I didn't think too unusual as she'd been asleep since 7.30pm. I gave her a feed, she went back to sleep. All very normal. An hour and a bit later she was awake again. This happened a few nights ago and Toby gave her some water and she went back to sleep (it's very hot at the moment). Not this time. She got quite annoyed. I'd had the impression that she would have had more milk at 2am had there been more so I went in and gave her another feed. She drained my breasts and still wasn't satisfied. I went back to bed and Toby climbed in the cot with her to try to settle her. This just served to make her more angry and she screamed.

Eventually I went in and sent Toby back to bed. I removed her sleeping bag (because it was hot), and took her into the kitchen for a snack (yummy corn and corgette muffins made and created by moi) and some water, changed her nappy, put her back in her cot, sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (when I'm done having kids I don't think I'll ever want to hear that bloody nursery rhyme again) and she went straight back to sleep. When she got up at 7am she wanted a breastfeed again then this afternoon she ditched her lunchtime nap in favour of a second lunch. And still had dinner!! And dinnertime slowly eased its way into bathtime as I offered her more and more food. And she ate it all. I've probably mentioned before that the principles of baby-led weaning are that you never force them to eat and you keep offering healthy food until they refuse it. Between 3pm and 6.30pm she had a decent helping of sausage and lentil casserole, cream cheese on toast, a couple of tablespoons of yoghurt, about half a small banana, an entire milk arrowroot biscuit, a bit of prune, some grapefruit, orange, apple and watermelon, a bit of rice cake, some rusk and a tiny amount of weetbix (weetabix for the poms). There may have been more but that's all my tired brain can remember. I blame the aliens.

She felt heavier today too (before she ate all that) and when I weighed her on our not-very-accurate scales she was 9.1kg; she's hovered around 8.6 and 8.7kg for a couple of months now. Good to see she is still hovering* around the 75th percentile.

(*Would've loved to find a better word than hovering... hate using the same word twice like that... but you know... I'm really too tired to care)

Anyway, I have to go. There's a cat on my back. No, really!

If I had to do it again... No. 1

This is the first in a series not because I have similar posts in mind but because I have no doubt that similar thoughts will occur in the future.

1. The cot

If I had to buy a cot again I would choose one with the maximum safe distance between the bars. This is something I didn't even think about when choosing our cot. I just picked one that was a good price, could be easily raised and lowered with one hand (some of them have buttons on either end that have to be pushed simultaneously to lower the side; try doing that whilst holding a sleeping baby; not that I ever raise the cot side anyway) and looked good. But now that I have spent many an hour sitting by the side of the cot, hunched over the rail, cutting off the circulation in my arms as I pat my baby to sleep, I would choose a cot with bars that I could easily get my hands and arms through. And I'd set up a really comfy mattress by the side of the cot so I could have a lie down myself. I nearly send myself to sleep on some nights and it amazes me that Phoebe can stay awake for so long.

2. The pram

Before I go on I should say that I love our Steelcraft Strider DLX in Kingfisher blue and have no regrets over choosing either that or the cot. But these are things that I didn't realise I might want out of a cot or a pram. That's not to say that had I known I would have made a different choice as we all know you can't have everything (unless you have oodles of cash and can afford a Bugaboo; but you can't easily swap between bassinet and stroller seat like you can with ours so you see, even the posh pram has it's bad points). What I wish our gorgeous babymobile did differently (other than having such wide-set wheels which make it impossible for Lucie, who has the same pram in sophisticated Toffee, and I to walk side-by-side on most pavements) is the recline levels. There are three of these, which is probably enough, but the upright never seems to be quite upright enough and the fully reclined position never seems to be quite reclined enough. A good stroller seat should go from almost flat to practically standing. But this is a very minor issue.

Another thing I'd do differently, and in fact might do if we have another baby, is I'd fork out the extra money for a car seat that goes onto the pram base. At around $300 it's hardly cheap and I turned my nose up at this when I was pregnant and choosing a pram, especially as it only suits babies weighing up to 9kg which Phoebe is now close to.

"Who would spend that much on a seat that will only do for 6-9 months?" I scoffed. "What an extravagant waste of money! No! I shall just hire a capsule from Queensland Ambulance for $70."

We certainly saved ourselves a fair bit of money but I got bloody sick of hauling that thing in and out of shops when running errands. There were a number of occasions when I didn't do quite so many things on my way home from somewhere because it was too much hassle getting her in and out of the car or because she was asleep and I didn't want to wake her. And how many times did Toby try to persuade me to place the car capsule inside the bassinet so we could push it along? Well, it was more than once. And I refused each time because it didn't feel safe. Hopefully by the time we have another baby they'll be cheaper or available second-hand because it still seems a bit damn expensive to me.

The aliens brought my baby back and they've done a reasonable job of fixing her. Here is a photo of her taken today looking gorgeous. She's getting over her cold and is just trying to catch up on some sleep. And she has at least one, possibly three more teeth coming through. I can feel her top right tooth one along from the front and I thought I could see the whites of her two front teeth just under the gums.