We decided on the most part not to make Ella’s photos public, since there are a lot of weirdos out there and we wanted to be a bit restrictive about posting photos of her online. I have a photo album of her set up on Flickr, which only contacts I have approved as friends and family can access. However, I am too proud a mummy not to show her off a little. So here are a select few pictures of my beautiful baby girl:

As I’ve mentioned previously, I couldn’t find blankets suitable for swaddling here in Norway, so I had to order them online. The first ones we got were Aden and Anais muslin swaddling blankets from the Hamill Baby online store. They come in lots of cute patterns, but since I wasn’t 100% confident we were going to have a girl, we opted for the unisex Jungle Jam set of four featuring monkeys, birds, giraffes and elephants. Very cute.

These blankets are good for a couple of reasons. Firstly they’re natural muslin, so they’re very light and they breathe well. Having a summer baby, this was pretty important to me; I was nervous about the baby overheating when all wrapped up. Secondly, they’re nice and stretchy, allowing for a good, tight swaddle that the baby can still wriggle in. Thirdly, they’re quite large, which makes it much easier to wrap the blanket all the way around the baby and use her body weight to keep it in place. So overall, I would definitely recommend these blankets… except if you have a wriggly little escapee like we do, the baby can sometimes manage to wriggle her hands free, rendering the swaddle useless.

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This is the first of my new blog series about various things that do and don’t work for me, particularly in relation to babies and baby products. I wanted to get this one posted first because it has been the best and most important thing we have discovered about parenting a newborn.

Coming from Australia, I expected to swaddle my baby and was very surprised to learn that it is not the done thing in Norway. It’s considered old-fashioned and some people believe it both restricts the baby’s freedom and hinders its development (both points are nonsense as far as I’m concerned).

Anyway, I had to order swaddling blankets from the UK (and I will post about the actual blankets later) because they are just not available here in Norway.

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I have never wanted this to become another boring baby-related blog, so don’t fear that I will never post anything but baby gush. However, in the eight weeks since I had my little Ella, we have tried any number of different baby products, parenting techniques, advice and so on… some of which have worked and others which were not worth the money/effort/pain etc. Originally I thought I would just list these in a single post, but when I started thinking about all the things I could talk about, I realised that I didn’t have the time or energy to review everything in one post. So a new category for this blog was born; what works, what doesn’t.

As I get time (ha ha) I will add blog entries about all the weird and wonderful things I have bought (and where I bought them, since it was usually online) or tired and let you know what worked or didn’t work, and why. Bear in mind that I am totally aware that every baby is different, and what works (or doesn’t) for us may be completely irrelevant for you and your baby. But it might amuse you to read about my adventures into motherhood anyway. In any case, there are a lot of products that I found after lots of research that I wished I had known about from the start, and I’d like to share these with you.

Watch this space!

On Tuesday the 18th of May, 2010, my beautiful baby girl, Ella Sofia, made her entrance into the world. I have been too busy staring adoringly at her to post until now, and am just taking a moment to make this announcement before getting back to the serious business of cooing at my baby girl. More details soon.

In an effort to do something useful besides sit around being uncomfortable and impatient, I decided last night I was finally going to finish organizing our DVDs into a database. A while back I bought some great software called Movie Collector (from collectorz.com) which is essentially a movie/DVD cataloging tool. I also bought a barcode scanner to make the process easier, so all I had to do was scan each barcode, and download the details for each DVD from the central database. The level of detail for each DVD title is impressive, including such information as region codes, thumbnail images of the cover/s, running time, release year, director, actors, plot summary… you name it. Read the rest of this entry »