Mobile Apps for your Pregnancy Needs
With those early signs of pregnancy, comes that feeling of excitement and curiosity. As you progress from 1 week to another, 1 month to another and 1 trimester to another, you explore new happiness and feelings. You Google the issues you face, join mommy forums, unveil pregnancy myths, play videos related to birth, healthy recipes and workouts. Well, these will continue throughout all your trimesters.
You’ll clarify every doubt with your ob/gyn. You’ll join the pregnancy class with the best reviews. But you will need a lot of things apart from these. Some pregnancy routines like battling bad memory, counting your contractions during labour pains, making a checklist of maternity and baby shopping etc. cannot be completed without a suitable app on your smartphone.
Here are your daily pregnancy needs for which installing and using an app is recommended:
Reminders: One of the problems only pregnant women understand is a weak memory. You’ll tend to forget your appointment date/time or that you had to make an important call, bill payments or your keys, it might be anything. A reminder on your phone could be the solution. Try out To Do Reminder by App Innovation or Google Keep which will sync with your Google account.
Days to go: You can easily count the number of months left for the due date on your fingers. But can you count the number of days that easily? Well I don’t think so. Let’s keep it in front of your eyeballs all the time. Apps you might consider for this one: Days Left Widget by leihwelt or My Day Countdown Timer by Yalantis.
How am I progressing?: There are many mobile apps exclusively created for pregnancy. Here you’ll find daily tips, weekly progress, forums and communities populated with moms-to-be same as your due date, details about what’s happening with your body and baby, what’s normal, what’s not etc. Such apps are usually a must for every pregnant woman. Best of all – BabyBump Pregnancy Pro by Alt12Apps Inc. (my personal favourite). Then there are My Pregnancy Today by BabyCenter and I’m Expecting – Pregnancy App by MedHelp Inc.
App for Dads-to-be: If you are a father-to-be and reading this, then you are surely concerned about your partner and baby. Going for doctor visits with your partner and asking her how she’s doing will keep you updated with the progress. But some useful apps on your phone will give you the extra knowledge you need during the entire pregnancy period. You’ll not find a variety of those exclusively for fathers, but here is one: New Dad – Pregnancy for Dad by morerice4u. BabyBump Pregnancy Pro by Alt12Apps Inc. will help you find answers to your queries through discussions dedicated to Dads.
Keep track of measurements: You’ll go from size small to large or even extra large. But this is the only time in your life you’ll not feel guilty about it. Regularly checking your weight, blood pressure, stomach size, waist size, breast size will give you that extra bit of fun during the period. Your doctor will definitely check some of these parameters, but why not keep a track of it yourself? Try out: Dynamic Weight & Body Tracker by AntiBit.
Checklist: You need to make a shopping list for your maternity period, newborn’s needs, hospital bag, post-maternity requirements etc. Phew! That’s a lot. Organize all of it with checklists so that you do not miss out on any. Shopping List by Fivefly is the one that will help you with this. Or Google Keep too can come to your rescue in making lists too.
Personal Diary: Months or years after you deliver, you’ll wish to revisit your pregnancy period. But most of it will be in your memories, slightly faded. So make a digital diary and note down your feelings, problems, solutions to those problems, newly discovered symptoms etc. every day. It will not only be an archive of your memories, but also help you relieve any stress by sharing it there. Diary Notes by WriteDiary is at your service. But if you don’t mind sharing your pregnancy diary publicly but anonymously, blogging services like Blogger and WordPress are the most well-known platforms for your ‘mission diary’!
Contraction timer: When you know it’s time to meet your baby, you’ll need to keep a track of the time intervals between the contractions from the first stage. After all, you wouldn’t want to stay in the hospital unnecessarily. So a handy app which will help you with this will be the saviour for the day. Smart Contraction by TemboSoft and Contraction Timer by Ian Lake are few popular apps for this.
Apart from these, you might need apps for few more pregnancy needs like setting up interval timer for your pregnancy exercises. Exercise Timer by NeuronDigital and Impetus Interval Timer are to name a few. Also, there might be WhatsApp groups for pregnant moms created city-wise or area-wise. You just need to hunt a little. So moms-to-be, pick up your phone and start installing some digital help for those 9 months.
Mrs. Archana Jathan Karkera, a new mother curious about the parenting universe holds a Masters degree in Information Technology. Her thought of “Explore yourself before you die” inspires her to dive into various hobbies – Blogging being one of them. Her scribbling partner archa
