During my pregnancy one of the best ways to fight any anxiety I was feeling was to research and find out what to expect and what was happening in my body. I tried many baby apps during pregnancy and researched many courses to go on. In my area baby classes are no longer free on the NHS and i didn’t want to fork out 200£ for a course.
Free Baby Apps and Courses are quite hard to come by, I spent ages researching and luckily stumbled across BabyAcademyUK on Instagram. They cover a range of information from baby care, breastfeeding, baby safety to the first 6 weeks at home. I actually did all the free courses available during my pregnancy, it was highly informative and engaging with an opportunity to ask questions and you receive all the information after to your email. I found this invaluable as a way of informing me what to expect and how to prepare for birth and after.
The courses are taught online which made it so much easier especially when I was heavily pregnant and didn’t have much energy. They also encourage partners or family who are going to be looking after the baby with you to join you whilst watching as they can have helpful tips for them too.
Peanut is a free baby app I used a lot during pregnancy especially at 3am when the insomnia hits, it works similar to a dating app where you can swipe to match as friends or not however I used it to join groups, you can find the group for your due month and year and you have a community of women all going through the same thing only weeks apart or even days.
The community was so helpful as you often found people sharing what symptoms of the different trimesters they experienced or you had first time mums able to ask people who had children already different questions that maybe you find embarrassing talking to a midwife about. It was such a great community of women supporting each other and encouraging each other to talk and having a laugh trying to figure out pregnancy.
Another baby app I used a lot is Baby+ It has a really fun measuring system where you can see week by week the size your baby is as a fruit, animal etc. I really enjoyed looking each week to see what exactly was happening with my baby and what was developing that week like finding out his lungs were forming or his eyelashes! I definitely looked forward to learning what was happening and the size my baby was growing to be.
The last baby app I would recommend is Baby Tracker I would actually download this in the hospital, you immediately have to start tracking feeds (including how much they are feeding), how often they pee and poop (also the colour of the poop) and how much sleep they are having. This is important to log as your midwives at the hospital and after will ask you for the information it also helps you figure out the pattern your baby will fall into eventually for feeds. We tried so many and this is by far the most helpful and easy to use to track everything for my baby.
Let me know what apps and courses you took and used during pregnancy and the months after!