Cotbed and mattress recommendations? Value for money.

[sabrinathethirtysomethingwitch]

My parents have very kindly offered to buy DS a cot.

He is still in the next to me crib. We bought an extra mattress for it. We thought the mattress that came with it was as hard as the road. I'd swear it gave DS a flat head in the space of a couple of weeks!!

I've heard Ikea cots and mattresses are good quality.

Any recommendations?

Would prefer a softer mattress

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MNHQ

Bump for the morning crowd

I have a nice Ikea cot. DS won’t sleep in it but it looks nice and is a great place to store toys

We're very happy with our John Lewis cot bed and mattress.

Ikea Gulliver. Can remove one side and use as side-sleeper, then as a normal cot, then drop level and remove side and use as a toddler bed. I think the frame is £60 new. One of my best purchases!

Thank you. What about mattresses? Worth buying a more expensive one?

We have a Mokee mini cot bed- it was £130 including the mattress, straightforward to put together and is solid/ good quality despite the low price!

They have some great colour options- I picked the aqua colour for dd which looks great and really different to the plain white or oak.

I'm afraid that UK child mattresses contain the highest levels of flame retardant chemicals in the world. These are invariably, eventually, found to be toxic and banned; but then the FR industry just puts out a near-identical chemical that is just as bad. Flame retardants are associated with a wide range of health problems, babies particularly vulnerable, because they are still developing. My advice would be to avoid an UK-supplied mattress (unless you can afford an 'organic' one, but they are not without their problems too). Buy over the internet from Sweden or Germany or most EU countries - since it's only really the UK (and Ireland) that insists on poisoning our children (and us) while they sleep.

One example: almost all UK mattresses contain organophosphates - the same chemicals that have been banned from sheep dips and crop sprays because they are so toxic.

California has just banned ALL flame retardants from children's mattresses because of the 'overwhelming scientific evidence' of the toxicity of these chemicals.

DO MOT BUY MOKEE. They repeatedly break promises and left us without anywhere for our newborn to sleep. Utter disaster. See all the one star reviews on trustpilot. They are the absolute WORST. When the items finally arrived the wood was full of dings and scrapes. Actually was the most stressful part of our pregnancy. How dare they treat pregnant women like this.

We were given a second hand Mothercare cot which had already been used for 3 kids. My son used it and we then turned it into a cot bed. He's just out if it now and he's 4. My brother in law bought a new Ikea cot and honestly it's so flimsy! And then they had to buy a toddler bed. In terms if a matters we bought the best we could afford at Mothercare.

We have a Mamas & Papas cotbed which we used for DD & now DS. We changed the mattress between DC. Think the mattress we now have is either MP or Cosatto. No problems with it at all; it has 3 height levels as a cot & then becomes a cotbed. Was over £200 new & mattress was over £100 but we felt it was worth it as it would last so long.