Went for Baby L’s 28-week check-up couple of weeks back 🙂

Glad to hear that Baby L has been growing well. He has doubled in size since last month’s check-up and is at a healthy 1.3kg now. In Dr Tan’s words, he is “just the right size” 🙂

In fact, Baby L has been almost doubling in size since his 5-month scan, so Wayne and I were happily extrapolating his weight… 300g at 5 months, 700g at 6 months, 1.3kg at 7 months, 2.5kg at 8 months and… Then we stopped in wide-eye horror when we were about to reach the 9 months mark. Ok I guess baby’s weight gain doesn’t work that way.

Baby L is now in a head-down position (not engaged, of course) and facing out 🙂 Dr Tan gave us some scans for keep-sake but seriously, we still can’t tell which parts of the baby we are looking at 😐

Anyway, besides Baby L’s updates, I wanted to share some lists and apps that we are using to help us with all the planning and tracking of Baby L’s development, expenses, baby benefits and items to buy.

Pregnancy, child birth and subsequently parenting is almost like a huge life-long project. Having some tools to help organise all the information, developments and commitments  can be really useful.

Pregnancy Milestones

There is a wide array of pretty notebooks and colourful organisers for parents to jot down the developments during pregnancy. A lot of them are so cute and gorgeous I feel like I want to buy them just to look at them 🙂 But before I even had the chance to be susceptible to my  compulsive buying habit of pretty looking things, Wayne found this really useful and practical app on iPad – Pregnancy HD.

We found the app useful because it gave us daily and weekly updates about what to expect during the pregnancy for both mummy and baby. It was rather reassuring to read about the body changes and odd sensations that I felt at the corresponding stages of pregnancy. It also has daily tips for daddies to help him understand what mummies are going through and how he can be more involved in the pregnancy 🙂 In fact, Wayne is more diligent than me in reading up on the milestones and erm… updating my weight 😐

During the initial part of the pregnancy, we found it especially entertaining to look at the size of baby in comparison to fruits so that we have a better image of baby in the tummy 🙂

You can also use the app to keep track of information like weight gain, gynae visits, baby scans, and even baby kicks!

When we were preparing for our shopping trip to the baby fair, the shopping list in the app was also particularly useful as it not tells you what items to buy, but also the quantity.

Shopping List

Speaking of shopping for baby… I’ve been warned by numerous mummies about the tendency for first time mums to overkill on the baby shopping. Hence, I’ve been particularly careful in that area, to a point that Wayne kept asking me, “Are you sure we have enough? Don’t you think we need more?”

A shopping list for baby’s essentials is really useful for first time parents. Besides the shopping list in the app mentioned above, here are a couple of other shopping lists which we found 🙂

This before-baby checklist was found in the Mar 2014 issue of Harper’s Bazaar Junior magazine. It shows a timeline of when to buy the items to prepare for baby’s arrival so you can gauge if you need certain things now or get them at a later stage.

We got this pretty-looking checklist from Robinson’s baby/ child department at the Heeren branch. I like it simply because it’s pretty, free and groups the items in various categories 🙂

I’m sure you can find countless other versions of baby shopping list online (pinterest is a great source for pretty and practical ones).

Baby Cash Flow

Having a kid is truly an investment. You are going to invest time, effort, emotions and of course, money.

To better manage the finances involved and reap the most out of the benefits that the government is providing for parents, we consolidated all the information we could find into an excel file with 3 spreadsheets – Benefits, Investments, Shopping.

My main source for consolidating benefits is this article from Singapore Motherhood. It’s an April  2013 article so be sure to click into the individual links listed in the article for the most updated info.

If you would like a copy of the excel which I’ve consolidated or would like to share some additional info, do leave me a comment with your email 🙂

That’s about all I’ll be sharing for now 🙂 And to compensate for the lack of proper photos in this post, here’s one of Wayne working on a customised alphabet poster for Baby L 😀

Hope fellow mummies (and daddies) have an enjoyable time planning and organising all your baby info as you anticipate the arrival of the little one!