Parent friendly holiday

Well it’s already two weeks since we got back from our first family holiday, and I did promise to report back, so while Buzz Light-toddler appears to be sound asleep here’s a very quick review of our stay in Dorset.

The plan was to find somewhere close to home in case things didn’t go too well. There was also a slight danger that we’d need two cars/trips to get everything there, so we wanted to find somewhere already equipped for babies. We found Hastings Farm Cottages on the Child Friendly Cottages website, and it had all the big stuff (cot, highchair, pushchair, etc.) provided, giving us a fighting chance of packing everything else for our four month night stay into a relatively small car!

I have no idea if all the Child Friendly Cottages are the same standard but Cowslip Cottage was excellent and came with everything we needed. Well, except for electricity for a bit but we were looked after with some hot water for an emergency cup of tea! (Entertainingly there was a small field of solar PV panels nearby but those were no use when the main supply is off, to protect the inverter- luckily they also had a generator to plug the kettle in to!)

It may not be far from home but Dorset has plenty of things to keep a toddler entertained, and Hastings Farm was a fabulous spot. We arrived with a baby, who decided it was a perfect place to start walking, so we had our own entertainment- chasing a new toddler!

Fortunately everyone survived and we now know that we can manage holidays, and we probably don’t need a bigger car. (They need less stuff when they get older, right?) So, any suggestions for where to go next?

Blast shield

I knew there was poo in my future, but I was clearly still unprepared- the recently decorated nursery already needs a new coat of paint! (Luckily the carpet cleaned up ok.) If I’d known we’d have an explosive/projectile baby, I’d have made the nursery a wet room instead… or decorated our bedroom and left the nursery alone completely!! Too late now though. Amazingly there seems to be a gap in the market for a changing mat that’s up to the job but after a bit of investigation we now have a blast shield to try and avoid future incidents…

This is the cheap and dirty solution (excuse the pun!) after originally contemplating building something more substantial out of polycarbonate. Not sure why I thought I’d have time to do that! Luckily we’d already been given an extra changing mat, otherwise some temporary cardboard engineering would have been required. By happy coincidence the new shield balances just nicely against the nursery door now that I’ve moved the changing table to conceal the last unguarded bottom event.

As yet untested, but nappy changing is once again mostly stress free. Fingers crossed it stays that way!

Waiting for deliveries

Luckily the carpet arrived before the occupant:

No more decorating for a while. Woo hoo! (But probably no more sleep for a while soon either. Boo hoo!)

My first social media policy

Despite seriously considering deleting my Facebook profile in the past, I haven’t managed it, yet. The downsides are still just about outweighed by the way I use Facebook, i.e. very little. That’s my choice though and after a conversation in the canteen recently, I started wondering whether it was right to effectively start building up a social media profile for someone before they’ve even been born!

Despite Google’s unhelpful profile name policy, Eric Schmidt apparently commented that young people may need to disassociate themselves from a trail of embarrassment online by changing their names. I can see his point, but wouldn’t it be worse if your dad had created a Facebook profile for you?! You’d need to change your name at least twice!

So, given it’s not possible to control information on Facebook, we’ve decided to try and avoid putting anything there on behalf of the bump. Not that we’re picking on Facebook- we’ll be avoiding posting anything on the other social networking sites too. This is a bit of an experiment at the moment, along with the whole (very wide) parental minefield, so the bump’s social media policy may evolve over time. For a start it needs a better codename!

We do still want to annoy at least a few people with news and photos when bump’s big day finally arrives though, so we’ll be sending out announcements via ‘old fashioned’ electronic mail and Short Message Service. (And there will definitely not be any live blogging!)

Half way there!

Jo was caught trying to smuggle a baby again on Monday:

Although, now that it’s over half way, you don’t really need a scanner!

Hmm, better get on with the decorating soon…

Just the one

Apologies in advance but I may be posting a bit more about this in the future:

Unfortunately I won’t be able to wind Jo up about having twins now we’ve been for the first scan. Fortunately, unless one of them is good at hiding, it isn’t actually twins!!