With the arrival of Baby 2 just two months away, I have started preparing a bit.

I’ve bought a (used) carry cot for our stroller (an Urban Jungle, which replaced the Bugaboo I didn’t like, which in turn replaced our beloved Stokke Xplory when Ingrid grew too heavy for it).

Why not use the Stokke? One, you can’t attach a standing board to it, and I do want to have that option for Ingrid for longer trips. Two, in Sweden’s climate we couldn’t make do with just the seat, we’d have to get a foot muff, or (more likely) a carry cot and a sleeping bag for it, and that would become expensive. Three, the Stokke is not very good in snow. So it will have to wait in the basement until spring.

I’ve also discovered that the concept of moses baskets is totally unknown in Sweden. I am now considering whether to make do with the carry cot we have (which is rather too heavy for that kind of use, really), or to buy a kind of a soft carry cot that some Swedish strollers use, or to make my own.

Clothes then and now

I have inventoried the baby clothes we have since Ingrid’s baby days. I had thought that we should have lots, probably won’t need to buy anything. But when I actually fetched the bags marked “0–3m” I saw there was hardly anything there. After a moment’s thought I remembered that we had borrowed a lot of clothes for the first 6 months. Now we’ve done some shopping at the Erikshälpen and Myrorna second hand shops, so we have something at least.

And, just as the Stokke was enough for a London winter but not for a Swedish one, I’ve realized that we will need to buy more warm clothes, hats and such. But I’m thinking that we should be covered for late September weather at least, so I’m leaving those purchases for later.

Speaking of clothes, I have learned that there is no official one-to-one conversion of clothes sizes from the UK scale (0–3 months, 3–6 etc) to the international one (measured in centimetres). Depending on the manufacturer, 0–3 months may correspond to 56cm or 62cm, 3–6 will be 62cm or 68cm, and so on.

By the way, here is what I wrote about buying for your baby and more specifically about buying baby clothes back in 2007.