Best little traveller!

G and I did had a huge road trip, 3 hours to visit family then 4 hours back home. I timed it she she was ready for a sleep for the bit of the trip, then lots of snacks and toys. Three hours is about her patience level for being in the car seat, so the last hour of the trip was high maintenance! Lots of singing and throwing every toy available at her lol. We know have a DVD player to try when her patience runs out next road trip :-). It's good that she is a great road trip companion as Hubby and I love road trips. She also loves the Ergo we bought, she goes to sleep on the back pack while we take walks etc. Well spent money!

Because G is such a little mover know, we need to finally buy a portacot. Especially as do a lot of traveling. I want this one, but we will see...

So much fun!

After G had so much fun in the ball pit at Gymbaroo I decided to buy some balls and clam shells for home. Balls were on special at Babies R Us for $9.95 and clam shells from Kmart for $25. Clam shells can also be used for a wading pool and/or sand pit!

so many modes of transport!

As previously posted we have now got two prams!  And now we also have a baby carrier - the Ergobaby Performance Carrier. Little G has never slept in the pram, and I tried and tried!  So the other day my Hubby ended up carrying a sleeping baby for 40mins while we were out.  We promptly went to Babies R Us and bought this Ergobaby performance carrier!  It was $200 so way not budgeted for, but my Hubby felt like it was now an essential purchase lol.  It carries up to 36mth old children, though my Hubby said there was no way he was carrying a four year old in a carrier.  Hehe.  We have yet to use so I will have to update the blog with a review in the near future.

Although we are on a careful budget I also bought two things from Tinyme.  In preparation of G going back to childcare I bought personalised iron on labels for her daycare clothes.  I also bought a personalised wooden puzzle.  She loves wooden puzzles and I thought that would be a cute way for her to start to learn her name and how to spell it!  Altogether with postage it was nearly $60, I find that Tinyme pretty much never has sales or discounts on their main items so I wasn't going to bother waiting for one!

Personalised

I love love personalised stuff!  For only my baby though, I recognise its not that cute on adults - even if Carrie on Sex in the City gave it a good whirl with her Carrie necklace.  G needs a clock in her room, mainly so I can monitor the time it takes to put her down for her sleeps!  I ended up getting this one from Deals Direct with her name written on it.  It goes with the disney pink theme that has slowly evolved as her room! I also bought a personalised shirt from Ebay with her in the Miss Kitty theme.

Because we have recently moved away from family, even though we will still see them every 6-8 weeks I realise that its important that G continues to recognise and be familiar with everybody.  I have been meaning to do up a photo album up for ages that she can look at all the time but hadn't got around to it.  Then I saw that Big W had a huge photo sale on and was selling soft cover photo books for $5, score I did one up online and will pick up in store shortly.

Gymbaroo

I finally got around to putting my bub in a Gymbaroo class.  When she was little little, we decided to go to a music class instead of Gymbaroo - probably for the best really as I think her age now is the perfect time to start Gymbaroo.  I am so glad I started to take her to playgroup classes very early (7 weeks), because to follow her progress and interaction with the world has been amazing!  She just loved the Gymbaroo class which involved exploring different play stations and also other sensory group activities.  We are also expanding our food adventures to proper baby led weaning, trying different biscuits and fruits - she is embracing it all!  Still not proper crawling at 9 months but she can get anywhere she wants by bum shuffling lol.

I bought her this love heart dress from Kmart for $8 and a whole stack of character dresses like this Dora one from Ebay.  Dresses are so easy for us so I am embracing them for the next year, shorts and skirts are out!

cheese sticks :-)

I could not resist buying this Winnie the Pooh overalls, they were from Target and with 20% off were $16. There are heaps of cute clothes coming in store but I am resisting because I know how cheap they are when they have sales!

Turns out my LO loves cheese sticks!  She demolishes them.  She is taking very well to solids (finally), but still does not love savoury stuff.  I am trying to get away from a lot of fruit food and just mixing one fruit with muesli, and sneaking in a couple of teaspoons of savoury ;-).  I am not a super mum at cooking thats for sure, but in a couple of weeks when we are settled in our new home I am going to try harder.

Toys Toys Toys

So it turns out that the toy library where we are living now is not that great.  Thats really disappointing, as G really needed some new toys - especially with the new developmental phase she is in.  My Hubby disagrees because he thinks she has a lot of toys already, but she has only a few actual toys (I posted about them when I bought them from the big toy sale that happened a few months ago), but most of her 'toys' are building blocks and stacking cups - thats why it looks like she has so many toys as they are scattered all over her play mat and need to be picked up every night.  So after extensive research and price checking I went to Kmart and purchased the following.  I think that until Xmas this should get us through :-).

$9.  This is such a classic toy

$9.  This is a shape sorter, plus a drum and a pull toy

G cannot stand at the moment, but this is a classic toy for when kids are learning to walk so they can push it around and stack their blocks in and out. $15

$25.  I like this one because it has heaps of push and spin and pull open stuff.  This one was a bit $$ but I think it will be money well spent.

Bargains beware!

At the moment there are a lot of sales out there!  G is in between sizes at the moment so some size zeros fit her and some size ones fit her.  I am trying not to 'stock up' on size ones to much as she is probably going to be in size one for a year and if I keep stocking up she will end up with a ridiculous amount of clothes!  So I have been good and only picked a few things up at the Cotton On sale in size one, a Jumper, a sparkly pink cardigan, a cute dress and two cute long sleeve tops.  I really really wanted to buy the cutest Smurfette dress from Big W - but it was $25, thats totally ridiculous.  And unlike Target, Big W never seem to have sales.  I tried to find a pic of the dress online but couldn't darn it!

$7.50

$7.50

$15

$10

$10

Thank god for Playschool!

I am not an advocate for babies watching tv.  In fact G wasn't allowed to watch any tv at all until now.  I have started randomly putting baby shows on for her to see if she was interested.  The only one she is interested in is Playschool.  Not interested in Wiggles, Hi-5..etc, only Playschool and by interested I mean stare at the tv for the whole episode like a zombie.  To appease my Mummy guilt I have been sitting down with her during the interactive bits and doing the actions with her :-).  During the fussy periods it has allowed me to keep her quiet and happy longer than normal!  I am also still trying to get her hold her bottle and drink from sippy cups.  I bought a whole new range to test out.

Video star

We are transitioning G into her own room at night.  Because I am a super anxious mummy we had to get a video baby monitor for me to spy on her!  After a lot of online research I realised that the best one was a Motorola one that was $360 :-(. Thats a lot of money!  I wanted it because it did great night vision and it also had a temperature display on it as well that told you what temperature the baby room was.  Then I stumbled upon the Target baby video monitor.  It had great reviews and was only $119: http://shop.target.com.au/target-digital-video-baby-monitor.  So I bought it!  Here is my review: it doesn't have a temperature reader on it, but you can buy one for the room for about $50 if thats something you really are worried about.  Turns out I can live without it, maybe next winter when we turn the heating back on I might get anxious about the temp in her room, but thats a long way away to worry about. Its awesome!  Great video display even at night and no interference, I am super happy with it.  Especially as I saved about $250 from the Motorola one I was going to buy!

One of the first things we viewed on the video monitor was G getting both her legs stuck out out of the cot :-(.  We went straight to Babies R Us and picked up this air wrap for $40.  Works perfectly!

Wonder weeks and revisiting the pram dilemma

G is in a Wonder Week - its the Wonder Week blogged about in this post by Football Mommy:http://www.thefootballmommy.com/2010/08/wonder-week-36.html.  She has done a perfect job capturing the description of this WW!  My baby was super fussy last week than we literally saw the day when all the new stuff came to light for her and now she is off exploring :-D.

If you read back to the start of my blog when I was pregnant, choosing the pram was a HUGE dilemma for us - well mostly me.  We had the Baby Jogger City Mini, which is an awesome pram.  But baby has hated it from the start and especially now, I end up just carrying her everywhere because its easier.  So I sold it, and we bought another pram!  I would of loved to get one of the flash Icandy or Bugaboo but we road tested heaps and the one she loved was the one that she could sit up completely in and see the world, it went up to 24kgs and it only weighs 6 kilos so is light and easy for me.  I will report back and let you know how she likes it! We got it in red.   If you read my other blog Every Day Girl you would notice I rant about the huge discrepancy in prices between in-store and online.  So Babies R Us had the pram $399 in-store but online they had it $299 - its the same company!! I asked if they would price match their online store and they said no?  Whatever, it was free freight as well so we saved $100.  http://www.toysrus.com.au/capella-cony-stroller-aqua/w1/i1670825/