Apps Reviews

Menstrual Calendar Free is a very, very pink app.  Aside from the color scheme of the user interface and tiny icons, it's really useful if you're trying to conceive.  My fave feature is the list symptoms including things like "breast tenderness, nausea, joint pain" etc and the pull-down menu of adjectives to describe cervical mucus output since it saves me the trouble of thinking up descriptors to fill in a generic notes field (which this app also provides).  This app also offers password protection, which is a handy feature, and the ability to add customer labels for your meds.  This is the best fertility tracker...if you can get past the pink interface.

Magic Days is fruity and useless.  It has a big bobbing baby head splash screen as if it were pretending to load functionality...but sadly, there isn't much functionality to it.  I installed it, opened it up, looked around and promptly uninstalled it.

My Days is the least pink of the fertility trackers that I've tried.  And it offers the user the ability to customize the color scheme, which I LOVE.  There is also a BMT tracker which is great.  I think this is the app that allows for the quickest updates.  It's fairly bare-bones.  Long-press on a day to bring up a basic list of events "start period, had sex, took pill".  There is a notes field for more in-depth tracking.

Sprinkle Party

A friend of mine is days away from having her second baby and has just left the workforce for good.  She was a little down about having a tighter budget, so her close buddies decided to throw her a "sprinkle party" which is like a baby shower, but instead of inviting everyone you know and being showered with gifts, you just have your besties there and a light sprinkling of presents.  It went over really well.  Her first was a boy and her second is going to be a boy, but her first was born in the summertime so everyone bought nice warm baby things and helped them stock up on diapers since they'll now have TWO little bottoms to cover.  We also helped stock her freezer with home-made meals so that she doesn't have to worry about cooking when she comes home from the hospital.

She's due on Valentine's day, but we all think the baby will come early.  Poor thing!  It's so cold out and she can't get any of her coats to zip up over her giant belly, so our friend's mom lent her this awesome retro poncho to wear.  I liked it so much that I picked up something similar at the Cracker Barrel store. It's fleece and not thick, lined wool, but I think it would serve it's purpose admirably should I be hugely pregnant during the winter months.

Apps

I've been researching more baby-related apps.  There are devices on sale like KickTrak and Itzbeen are on sale at many retailers that help pregnant moms tally kicks and new moms to help keep track of feeding and nap times.  Luckily, I'm a smart phone user, so I plan on saving myself about $55 by downloading free and inexpensive Android apps that do the exact same thing as these devices.  So that's good.  I'll bet there are all sorts of baby apps that I'll download and post reviews about, but so far I'm just using a fertility tracker app called "My Honey Days".

It's a simple app with a fairly clean interface, though why the designers decided the color scheme HAD to be pink and purple and that a fruity decorative font is better than something normal looking, I'll never know.  The key is at the bottom of the screen and there is a submenu allowing users to record data about their frequency of intimacy and moods.  Unfortunately, this app is no longer downloadable on the Android market.  I have downloaded a few other apps to try out and will post reviews when I've gotten the chance to look them over.  

Replenishing my stocks & weighing in

I stopped in at my local Walgreens to buy two new bottles of prenatal vitamins and they wanted $15.55 for them when I can drive to the next town and get the same product for $8.44 at Walmart.  Needless to say, I made the drive. I feel like I'm definitely accomplishing something by trying to prepare my body for pregnancy.  I'm impatient to start "trying" for real, but at least I'm working towards the goal by getting out to walk the dog on a more regular basis and taking my vitamins.  I'm considered obese by the BMI scale, so I'm trying to get my weight into a more favorable range for conception.  The ideal pregnancy BMI, according to many reputable sources, is 20-25.  My BMI is 33.  Yikes.  I definitely have my work cut out for me, but my target weight is a number on the scale I haven't seen in a decade, so I doubt I'll make the ideal BMI grade.  But any little bit is bound to help, so I'll keep trying to lower my weight before we start trying to make a baby.  

I bought a scale today and when I was getting out of the car, my husband came outside to greet me and help me carry things into the house.  He spotted the scale tucked under my arm and jokingly said, "I don't want one of those evil things in my house."  Sorry, Honey, but it has to be done.  I need to track my progress between now and May.  

Who needs doctors, I have an app for that.

Hard to believe it's been a month since I last found time to check in.  I've been reading What to Expect Before You're Expecting on my Kindle, and the one thing that really bothers me about the tone of the book is that the author is constantly talking about your "healthcare team" like they're some friendly force who walks you through every decision along the way of becoming a mother and always advocates for your wishes to be carried out exactly.  I haven't really found this to be the case in my experience with the healthcare system.  I am always my best advocate.  On my last visit to my GYN, I finally got around to asking about a lump in a sensitive area that was causing quite a bit of discomfort since my recent weight gain.  He wisely suggested that I leave it be since the surgery would be more 'disruptive' to our baby-making plans than leaving it would be, but it's becoming quite a nuisance and I called to schedule to have it removed, and I haven't gotten a call back.  Doctors are never easy to get ahold of, and I just don't envision them being as helpful as the book seems to suggest they will be.  I guess I could luck out and get a stellar team behind me, but I kind of doubt it.

I showed my husband the fertility tracker app I installed on my smart phone and he kind of freaked out. He said it was because he thought it was weird that I would keep track of when we're intimate, but I think really he was freaking out because our conversations have always begun with "next year, when we're trying for a baby..." and now that 'next year' is THIS year!