When to go on nursery waiting list?

[Frida9]

Hi, I am currently 19 weeks pregnant with my first child. My sister has a 1 year old child and has freaked me out a bit by asking why my baby isn't on a nursery waiting list yet. Baby wouldn't start nursery until February 2024, should I be contacting nurseries now or wait a while? How bad are waiting lists in general? Unfortunately there's only one nursery near where I live so if we didn't get in there things would be far more difficult.

Definitely contact nurseries now, if they are anything like the good ones around here

If you only have one in your area I'd be ringing them asap

That seems like madness but if it's the only one near you then no harm in Contacting them. I put our daughters name down in the feb to start in the July.

Before pregnancy round here

It really depends on your nursery... But no harm in doing it soon!
With dd we put her down at 12 weeks old. But a new housing development has made the nursery much more popular so with baby (currently 13 weeks pregnant) we put them down when I was 8 weeks pregnant!

I'm a childminder and I've got a waiting list until September 2023. So realistically the next space available I will have is January 2024 at the very earliest.

Now.

With my first I lucked out with a new nursery that had just opened.

When we put our second's name down I was 12 weeks pregnant and they were closing the list already!

It won't do any harm to do it now. We got DD1 in by good luck when she was about nine months old - they had a waiting list for the toddler room but not the baby room. DD2 has been registered basically since I was about 12 weeks pregnant. It's a great nursery and I didn't want her to miss out (or to have to do two nursery runs on my way to work!).

How does that work?

Our nursery is in high demand, we only managed to get in because it was lockdown and people had given up their places. I’m pregnant with our second and due in November. They got me to sign up in the summer to make sure I got a place as they’d already started to get booked up.

Well I filled in the application form last night, bit odd when I couldn't put on baby's name or gender and had to put tbc on allergies but at least we'll be on the list of needed

👍 well done! We were lucky with DS but waiting list now over a year so will be putting next baby down in pregnancy

At 12 week scan the norm here - although for siblings maybe not as important as they often get priority over new babies/toddlers