Due February 2025 - Thread 4

[UrbanSquirrel]

Just creating this so that we have somewhere to continue when Thread 3 fills up. If you're due to have a baby in February 2025 (or late January or early March, as we have a wide spread!), come join us for support, advice and (at present) some really useful Black Friday recommendations! Big welcoming hugs to all the usual suspects coming over from Thread 3 🤗

Yeah it is amazing, I feel very grateful !!

I love the baby box, but I’d rather have the nursery provision England has.
There is no help here until nearly 4 😭😭😭

@UncharteredWaters Ouch. Didn't know that. Fair point...

*Scraps plans to move posthaste to Scotland

30+5 growth scan today and 84th percentile bub is at 4lb4oz already with 98th percentile head, 96th tummy and 40th legs lol! they are looking at him being 9 up to 9 & 1/2lbs when full term and I am bricking it 😂😂😂

Nearly 4? Where do you live? We got the funded hours in Argyll & Bute the week after the kids turned 3. And everyone gets 30h, in England it’s means tested! And I think the biggest thing is the option to defer school entry, my Feb 20 baby isn’t going to school till she’s 5.5!

@apple67cherry Ooh sounds like a chunky baby ☺️ But a very happy and robust one. The percentiles will even out, I'm sure! x

Just to say, in case anyone is interested, that the ONS have just released their baby names data for the England & Wales for 2023. I suppose it's probably not that important to see whether our favourite names are moving up or down on last year, although some are real climbers. I also quite enjoy feeling like an old lady, scandalized to see how Arlo-Blu is more popular than Nigel. https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/babynamesinenglandandwales2023

@CarrotySnack I was looking at it yesterday! Have now mentally discounted a couple of names because they're shooting up the ranks.

https://names.darkgreener.com/

This is useful for looking at the trend over the last 30 years. 2023 data haven't been added yet.

Has anyone got a firm name? Think we're probably going to hold out until we see the baby.

I am a nerd and love the ONS data! Even the most popular names, when you think about how many babies are born (700,000+) a year, 4000 having the same name is still quite small. I only say that as my two do have quite common names 😂 in England at least, interestingly very very different in Scotland!

We had a firm name for my daughter but didn’t for my son and named him when he was born, I didn’t love his name and still don’t but I liked it enough and of course 3.5y later it totally suits him!

@apple67cherry you poor thing! Hope they're overestimating!

I'm also hugely nerdy about names! Find them so fascinating.

We actually picked his full name the day we found out his gender! My DH had leaned towards picturing a girl and I was convinced he was a boy, but we knew we'd both be really happy either way. I'd made him look at my names lists (mainly my boy one!) even though he hadn't wanted to talk names before knowing the gender so he didn't get attached to the idea of one gender baby and name and then hear the opposite, so we knew the main contenders. And then it all clicked for us, which names and order and why on the drive back from the scan to tell his parents!

Did anyone else (who is deciding or decided) find the name they came up with was quite different than names they'd had in their heads for a while?

It's so tricky and fascinating - I agree with you @OrangeSlices998 that even the most popular names aren't that numerous, but otoh I've a friend who lives in a very affluent town in leafy Kent whose daughter has three Ottilies in her small nursery class!

I'd love to have a little list of a few names we can test once baby is here, but there are so few boys names we both really like!

@ridl14 The names we have on our shortlist are very different to the names I had picked before the 12w scan.

When I started discussing my choices (which, TBF, are pretty 'out there' - I wanted something from the middle ages) with my partner it became obvious that he really wasn't into any of them, so I have reluctantly set them aside.

We both like fairly uncool 1970s names, as it turns out, so I suppose that'll be our compromise between incredibly old-school and totally contemporary.

@UrbanSquirrel and @ridl14
Sonographer must've said at least 3 times that baby was THRIVING😂😂 and we could even see his chubby cheeks and thigh rolls on the normal 2d ultrasound it was amazing, my little chunk. I'm 5ft so we will see how this goes down 😂😂

Like you, @ridl14, we had MiniSquirrel's full name sorted pretty soon after finding out she was a girl. Interestingly we'd been fixed on a totally different girl's name beforehand (Catherine, nn Kitty, in honour of an ancestor of DH), but, I can't explain why, it just didn't work in my head any more. So she has become Beatrice.

We're quite fond of traditional names (and so I am always a mixture of fascinated and aghast at these name lists); but DH said we couldn't have names that any family or close friends had 🤦🏻‍♀️ If she'd been a boy it would have been a fight to the death between Will (me) and Rollo (DH, though I was never quite sure how serious he was about that; probably more so than his suggestions of Osric and Aethelfrith... 🤔)

@UrbanSquirrel I was surprised to see that Catherine has fallen out of the top 500!! In 2023 there were almost as many Dakotas and Arwens as there were Catherines. 😱

Beatrice is a beautiful name and I do like Rollo (and Will, but that's a given). I was convinced that the chocolate was spelled the same way (not a bad thing/quite entertaining for a kid for the first ten years or so) but have just been corrected by Google - it's Rolo!

We've only got one name we both like enough to name our child and it is on that 2023 list (albeit different spelling!). Not number 1 or anything which probably would put me off, but it's a name I really love so it being a bit more popular won't stop me. Hopefully baby suits it when he arrives or we're a bit screwed 😂

We have a name for a boy and one for a girl but I’m not 100% sure on either of them!

Been feeling like it’s a girl the entire pregnancy and now I’m convinced it’s a boy; I’m getting excited to find out when they make their arrival!

Is anybody really starting to struggle with work around the 30 week mark? I have crippling pelvic girdle pain and finding it so hard. Had a three hour meeting in work last week and could barely walk the next day. GP offered to sign me off work but was hoping to hold on until closer to the due date. Is anybody else nearly ready to finish up?

@Meltedchocolateteapot if you’re able to WFH I’d recommend doing so from a birthing ball! I spent my last few weeks bouncing my way through meetings! If not, ask work whether they’re able to accommodate you any more in any way (mine told me last time I could order a birthing ball to keep in work and use there if I needed to be in, might be worth asking?) but overall, if you need to finish, you need to finish.

In the grand scheme of things, your baby isn’t going to remember if you went back to work when they were 40 weeks old or 50 weeks old (for example!), but you’ll remember spending the final weeks of your pregnancy in pain and feeling shitty. You need to put yourself first so that you can put baby first, if that makes sense. It’s not worth making yourself ill for the sake of a few extra weeks at work. Hope you’re doing okay!

Thanks @retrievermum and you’re so right. When my GP brought up signing me off work I reassured her that I’d be able to manage and would work at my own pace etc. which is why I wasn’t signed off sick. But on Friday I had a meeting with my boss and I felt so disheartened afterwards. It seems the plan is to ramp up the work to get as much out of me before I go on Mat leave. We have a very unrealistic deadline in December (2 weeks worth of work that they want to have completed in 4 days) and my boss was basically saying if we work round the clock we’ll be able to get it done, and even asked me to cancel a half days leave that had been approved long ago. I will usually go above and beyond in work and don’t mind working late etc. but at this stage in the pregnancy my workload is having a very negative impact on me and I honestly think work wouldn’t care if I destroy my health (and my babies health) once they aren’t inconvenienced.

We had a top 5 decided shortly after we found out the gender and I was so sure on one of them but we agreed to wait until she was born to see what suited. But I've completely gone off three of the five which i never thought I would do.

In the last week my husband threw a curveball and suggested Felicity and now I can't think of anything else. So I guess we've probably got the name now, but we will still wait until she's born, just to make sure!

This is rubbish, you should definitely be trying to wind down now and I don't know about you but my concentration levels are not the best and I get energy dips every afternoon which means I'm more likely to make mistakes etc... but luckily have a good team to work with. Personally I'd be having a conversation with your manager about how difficult it's getting and that essentially you could be signed off but you really don't want to do that but the added stress is making everything worse.

As always workplaces couldn't care less about your health so make sure you look after that!

@Odessa1 Felicity is a lovely name and presumably fairly uncommon at the moment (I haven't yet read the full ONS data)? It's funny, isn't it, how names that seem to be surefire hits in early pregnancy just don't seem to fit any more at a later point?

@Meltedchocolateteapot So sorry to hear about your discomfort and all your troubles with work. You poor thing, it sounds awful. I like what @elb1504 suggested about speaking to your manager and making it clear that you do have a case to be signed off by the GP but you have chosen to continue for now, because you don't want to leave them in the lurch. On the other hand, they have to make reasonable accommodations for you (and loading on extra work certainly doesn't sound like one!).
^
But, as you said yourself, the most important thing here is your health (including avoidance of stress) and the baby. So if work aren't listening, maybe the GP is the way out? Do you have your cover in place yet - is there any way you could hand over more to them earlier?^

I'm sorry, for some reason italics went totally haywire in that last post. Not entirely sure what happened 🤨