Baby shopping overload!

We are now into our second full day in London and I think I may have hit baby shopping overload! If you are lucky enough to live in an area where there are many baby shops and options I expect you can probably space out your purchases over time. Where we live there is limited variety and so we are using our time in London to pick up items that are either not available where we live or they are better priced here. This equals the equivalent of a baby shopping spree.  Let me tell you, babies are EXPENSIVE!!

The first splurge came yesterday when we found ourselves in Baby Gap. I know for many of you Baby Gap is considered a kind of a staple, but for us it’s a novelty and they have masses of cute things for babies and children. In the main, we bought baby onesies of all kinds – short sleeve and long sleeve – with so many cute designs on them. I seem to have an attraction to anything that comes with built in animal ears.  The husband seems to like sharks, robots and cartoon characters. It’s really hard to know what clothes to buy for a baby that is going to be born in the middle of the Mediterranean summer where temperatures range from 35-40 degrees celsius (95-104 F). If the baby is in AC then he has to have long sleeves and legs.  If he’s outside (e.g. going for a stroll at nighttime) he’s going to need to have something short sleeved/legged on. So our logic is we are buying everything!

Today we had our consultation with the John Lewis Nursery Advice Service. For those of you UK based, I would highly recommend you go along for one of these free sessions even if you plan to purchase your items from elsewhere. We had a really lovely consultant lady take us through all of the necessary items from strollers, to breast pumps, to cots – everything you could possibly need. As you go through all the things, she takes a little zapper machine that records all of your choices so you can make a baby gift list for friends and family (like a wedding registry, but for baby stuff). For us it was a bit different because the list function is pretty much redundant, but it did help us to clarify some things we were not sure about and we actually changed our minds on the baby seat base after hearing the advantages of some other options.

So after deciding to leave the big things for another day, I picked up a “few small things” – muslin cloths, bath towels, baby bottles, bibs, onesies etc – and promptly dropped £170 in the process. Eeeek! The husband is now not letting me near baby shops ever again (i.e. until tomorrow). As for the big things… this is what I think we will end up going for :

Stroller – Bugaboo Chameleon 3 (classic grey colour)

Car seat – Maxi Cosi Pebble (some kind of black/grey colour)

Car seat base – Maxi Cosi 2WayFix 

You can buy adaptors for the Maxi-Cosi car seat to clip into the Bugaboo frame so on those occasions where we prefer to wheel the car seat about, this is what we will do. These big ticket items will be bought when we’re back as neither of us fancy schlepping them to the airport and by the calculations of the GBP against the EUR currently, it’s actually cheaper to buy the Bugaboo where we are in EUR than it is in London in GBP.  This is a rare occurrence!

We are still totally undecided about the baby cot, but the other question that today threw up is what the baby will sleep in during the day? We need to have something portable so that when he sleeps during the day we can always be in the same room as him. Is that a Moses basket, or do we get a small cot that can live temporarily in our open plan living room/kitchen?  The jury is still out on this decision.

In non-shopping news, we were taking a rest back at the hotel before dinner last night and the small dude started to get quite active with his dancing so I put hubby’s hand on my belly on the off chance that he could feel it.  After about 5 minutes of my husband staring at me like I was deceiving him about the kicking, the small dude did some kind of impressive manoeuvre and his daddy got to feel him for the first time.  It was brilliant!  So at 21 weeks and 2 days, daddy felt baby move!  Super exciting times!