Tiny Love “Tiny Hug” Baby Carrier

When I was pregnant with J, I was really keen to get a carrier for him. It never happened, because I couldn’t find one that I liked enough, one that held baby in a good position with plenty of support (I hate ‘crotch danglers’); one that fitted me as well as Daddy P; one that wasn’t difficult or fiddly to adjust and put on and one that would offer longevity of use.

When I was pregnant with A, I was introduced to the Tiny Love range. Included in this collection is a baby carrier called Tiny Hug. I was immediately smitten.

Suitable from 3.5kg-18kg (7lbs 7 ounces up to 40lbs) this carrier is available in black or natural, and is lined with a soft touch fabric. For small babies (up to 5kg / 11lbs) there are additional straps to keep babies legs in optimum position. With babies up to four months old you should always carry them on your front, facing in to your chest. The part of the carrier that is against the babies back is lovely and firm and feels like it is really holding them well and supporting their back properly. Their legs are tucked up and into the fabric at the bottom of the carrier against your tummy in a natural position (Baby A automatically got his legs into the right position without me having to adjust him in any way) There is a chest strap to go over the front of baby to ensure they are securely held in the carrier with no chance of them wriggling too low. The chest strap and the strap which does up on the adult is easy to adjust for your size with sliders to find the best position to suit you and your baby. You can continue using the Tiny Hug carrier with baby on your front facing in until they reach 12 months old – as they get taller the fabric can be folded out of the way to free their legs, first in frog position then in legs around waist position, while still providing fantastic support under their bottom and on their thighs, no ‘crotch dangling’ going on here.

If you prefer, from four months, you can use the carrier on your back. Personally I would use it on my front for as long as possible so I can see baby, but that’s my personal preference; it’s nice to know you have plenty of options with this carrier depending on what you’re doing. When you’re using the carrier on your back there is even a little mirror on the shoulder strap for you to be able to unhook it from the little hidey-hole and check on your child whenever you wish to without having to stop and take off the carrier.

The carrier is fitted to the adult with two straps like you would get on a back-pack. Added security to ensure the straps don’t slide off your shoulders comes from an additional horizontal strap which goes between the two back-pack straps. When using the carrier on your front, this strap is on your back. Initially I found this really awkward to do alone – then I realised that I hadn’t got it adjusted properly and it was too high up, putting too much pressure on the base of my neck, so once I adjusted it I found it much easier to do (like a bra strap, except instead of a hook and eye fixing it’s a nice solid plastic clip which clicks reassuringly when you’ve done it up properly)

In the instruction manual it shows putting baby into the carrier before putting the carrier on yourself – I thought this would be really awkward, but it’s so much easier to do than I imagined. I place the carrier on the bed or sofa and lie the baby into it, do up the straps and then lift the carrier onto myself. Once it’s done up it feels secure and comfortable, and baby is at a good level in front of me – he isn’t stuffed down too far making me feel like I am going to suffocate him, but he is contained enough within the carrier for me to feel comfortable that his neck is well supported.

So far I’ve used the Tiny Hug for the school run and for doing housework. Baby A is a much more cuddly baby than J ever was – while J was the sort of baby who wanted to be put into his Moses basket and left when he was ready to sleep, A is the kind of baby who much prefers constant contact. It can be more practical for the school run than the pram – especially if I’m pushed for time, as it’s faster to get in and out of the house with him in the carrier as well as over the barrier between our cul-de-sac and the main road heading toward J’s school (with the pram I have to walk the opposite direction the length of our road to where the barrier ends, and join the main road there to walk back on ourselves the other side of the barrier, which isn’t much but adds another five minutes to our walk); When I’m trying to do some housework and A is crying every time I try to put him down anywhere, then I put the carrier on and he’s happy – and normally falls asleep – while I carry on.

The downside is that I can’t get him in or out of it without him waking up, which is a shame, since he does normally fall asleep in it, but then it’s not a huge downside and to be honest I don’t think there is a carrier which would allow me to put him in / take him out without him waking up. To begin with I wasn’t sure about how it would affect my back by carrying him, but it distributes the weight better across my shoulders than carrying him normally so it’s probably not doing as much damage in that respect. The clip is quite fiddly to do up when you’re carrying baby on your front, particularly if (like me) your hair is at a length where it can get caught up (ouch!) but it’s something you get used to quickly and once you have the knack it really isn’t too bad at all. 

He stays nice and warm despite the chilly morning school run wearing a sleepsuit, thin jacket and a hat (with a vest underneath obviously) as he is well wrapped in the fabric and cuddled against my chest. At this stage his legs are completely contained in the fabric, as he gets older and they stick out I’ll probably need to dress him properly, but for the time being it’s easy to put him in there first thing without worrying about that. I put it on before I put on my coat, so that if necessary I can wrap my coat around the carrier and contain him within that, though it hasn’t been needed so far as the colder days creep in that might be something I do.

I also got Daddy P to have a go wearing it the other day and though he didn’t take it for a test run he found it easy to adjust and he seemed quite impressed.

I do rate this product and for anyone seeking a baby carrier I would recommend they add this one to their shortlist. As always I recommend try before you buy, but I am very happy with this item and can see it being well used. It's sold for around £75 which is a fair size price tag, but you do get a very high quality, weatherproof baby carrier (the outer fabric is water resistant) which can be used until baby is around 36 months old.

Click the link for the Tiny Love website and Tiny Love Facebook page. You can also view product videos on YouTube.

“Waiting For A Delivery”

17.07.15

It’s always the way, isn’t it. You place an order for something, or make arrangements for something, and then something else pops up and interferes with your brilliantly made plans.

I ordered a product weeks ago. Months, even. It was out of stock, and has been since the order was placed.

Yesterday I got the e-mail I’d been waiting for – it was in stock, had been dispatched, and would be delivered to me by courier today.

Unfortunately, today I have a hospital appointment, so there will be a portion of the day I’m not here. It would be just my luck for the delivery to arrive while I’m out. (Because they can only say delivery will be “between 9am-5pm” and can be no more precise than that)

As the time I have my hospital appointment means I may not be home in time to collect J from school, I’ve made arrangements with my mum, who is coming up to my house as I write this (she’ll be on the M25 at the moment) so that if I’m still at hospital, she will go and collect J from school. This means even while I’m out, she will be here to accept the delivery I’m expecting.

What are the chances that the courier will arrive during the 10 minutes while mum is collecting J from school before I am home from the hospital? Or that I pull the car into the back garden just as the courier rings the front doorbell?

I’m going to have to keep my fingers crossed; I don’t want to miss this delivery because I’ve been waiting SO VERY LONG for this product to arrive! Product review coming soon!

Wish me Luck,

Mummy P

xxxxx

Shiny New Kitchen Appliance!

A few years ago, my parents were kind enough to get Daddy P and I a second hand dishwasher. It did well and served us faithfully for five or six years until without warning one day it was loaded and switched on and nothing happened. My cousin spoke to Daddy P over Skype and they located the manufacturing date to see if spare parts could be ordered for it and we discovered that dishwasher was 20 years old. No wonder it had finally given up. Spares weren’t in vast supply (unsurprisingly!) and I was resigned to washing up forever by hand, so I brought a pair of pink washing up gloves, tuned the radio in and danced my way through hours of washing up on a daily basis.

On Black Friday, on a whim, I happened to look up dishwashers from several retailers who were having special sale prices. Lots of them were still far too expensive, even with the Black Friday discounts, but one from Curry’s caught my eye and with the discount it was a very good deal even with delivery and installation on top.

On the website initially it showed delivery available for next day, so I selected that. After the sale was completed it said next day delivery was not possible as it was a 2 person delivery / installation (I would have thought with a dishwasher that would flag up anyway, before the delivery has already been chosen for next day and order is completed?) I had a selection of alternative delivery dates – I wasn’t fussed in the slightest so I clicked the first three showing available. I received an automated email saying that I would receive confirmation of delivery date by email soon. Nothing arrived.

I realised after ordering that I had an appointment which I couldn’t avoid which conflicted with one of the proposed delivery dates. I e-mailed customer services at Curry’s apologising about that and asking them to ensure delivery did not happen that day, but delivery any other day was fine. It took four days for a reply to arrive (after the date of the confliction anyway) and at that point the customer service guy advised that delivery was showing as booked for another date (obviously) but then I was confused by the date he gave me, as it wasn’t a date I thought had been optional when I’d made the order. It wasn’t an inconvenient date, but it meant that delivery would not be for 11 days after I’d made the order, which I felt was quite a long time. To date I have not received a reply back from the customer care team at Curry’s following my response to their initial e-mail.

On Tuesday morning I received a text message advising that my time slot for delivery was between 07:35 and 11:35. I was up and dressed and trying to get J sorted out when I had a missed call from a mobile number on my phone. When I rang back I was cut off, so I checked out the front window and saw the Know How van parked outside, so I dashed down and found one of the delivery guys on the doorstep. He was polite, wasn’t phased at all by the fact that both dogs were going absolutely nuts howling, barking and screaming. I put Holly in her cage in the kitchen and shut Buddy in the front room with the gates, and we discussed whether it would be easier to bring the dishwasher straight down the hallway through the house or come in down the alleyway at the side and through the back gate into the utility room directly. Due to the tight corner and the step, the delivery guys agreed straight through the house was the best option.

I never like leaving people alone in my house in that kind of situation. It makes me feel a bit weird. But what option did I have, but to leave him removing the old dishwasher from the space while I ran back upstairs to carry on sorting out J for school. A couple of minutes later, there was another knock at the door – I went and opened it and delivery man number 2 said hello. He came into the house and the first guy had already got the old dishwasher disconnected and ready to go – the two of them walked it through the house, and off to the van. Then the shiny new black one came in – I had to rush back off upstairs – and finished getting J ready. I heard the front door open and shut and saw delivery man number 2 was walking down the path to the van with a load of packaging stuff. A couple of minutes later I glanced out of the window again and he’d turned the van round ready to go. Then the first guy called me from downstairs, and I went down and found him ready to leave. He said he’d tested it and all was working fine, advised me to read and follow set up guidelines (adding rinse aid and salt before first use etc) and contact them if there were any issues. He asked if I had any questions, confirmed they’d taken my old dishwasher and the packaging for the new one and then he asked if it was OK to pet Buddy!

Now bear in mind, this bonkers dog had been bouncing around the front room howling, barking and screaming from the time the delivery truck had pulled into sight in the road outside, the whole time this guy had been in the house and as we’d stood talking at the front door, Buddy was separated from us by a baby gate so you could see him leaping all over the sofas and circling the room as he continued his deafening song. I looked at the delivery guy in disbelief. “Yeah, he’s fine to pet,” I said quickly. Buddy immediately shut up with a good ear scratch. “I love dogs,” The delivery guy said, “He’s a beauty.” I gathered my jaw up from the floor and managed to smile at him. “I like him more when he’s shouting less,” I said.

J and I left for school two minutes later, they’d already gone, no hanging around there! I was absolutely amazed at how quickly they’d got it sorted – and the only thing that took the two of them was bringing the new one into the house and taking the old one out, the fitting etc was all done by one. In total, they arrived at 08:07 and they left at 08:28. J and I were at school at normal time, and there was me worrying about being late!

When I got home I had a cup of tea before I started fiddling with the dishwasher, and I read the User Manual like a good customer. Our old dishwasher I never learned how to do certain things like putting the salt in and I feel that’s ridiculous as I’m sure it’s fairly standard in any dishwasher, but having never done it before I didn’t know. So I wanted to know about this dishwasher, and after reading the User Manual I managed to follow the set up guidelines and get it all organised within half an hour.

Go to product on website

I’m not daft – I did read the reviews before making the purchase – and one thing people had commented upon was not having enough room for larger dinner plates on the bottom rack due to the low position of the top rack. However I had also read that the top rack was height adjustable in the info about the product on the advert. I risked it – my dinner plates are huge. There was no way they would fit in the bottom rack with the top rack on the lower position. The instructions for changing the height aren’t exactly full and easy to understand but it provides enough information for a person to work it would and adjust. I managed it! After putting the top rack in the higher position there is just enough space for the arm to move before the tops of my dinner plates. If my dinner plates fit, I can confidently say that most would. You’d just need to adjust the top rack to do it.

I added the salt and the rinse aid and followed the set up guide by putting water into the salt compartment to run the dishwasher for the first time without any washing up in it. Another comment I’d seen on reviews was that it was really loud. Since the dishwasher lives in the utility room anyway, noise isn’t something that really bothers me. If I’m in the front room watching TV or upstairs I can’t hear a dishwasher running. I don’t know what volume these reviewers were expecting – especially as it states on the product info the noise level produced – but while it’s not silent, I would say it’s about average, not loud at all. When the cycle ends, the dishwasher beeps a few times – this beep is loud, and was clearly heard by me when I was upstairs in the front bedroom at the furthest point in the house away from the location of the dishwasher. If this went off at night it would probably disturb me, and the dogs, but probably not Daddy P or J unless they weren’t properly asleep anyway. I don’t know if it beeps intermittently once it’s finished until you open it, but as I heard it yesterday I came downstairs and opened it. It does beep if it is turned on and the door is not properly shut which is fine, until you’re loading things into it and it gets a bit annoying. I turned off the power while I was loading it!

I like the additional wiring in the racks to move around and make the best set up for what washing up you have – it can provide flat spaces if needed, or angled ones as required. The cutlery basket holes are a variety of shapes and sizes to try and accommodate a wide range of cutlery styles but unfortunately my sharp knives (which I put in handle-up) do not fit in there well as the handle is too large to fit in the gaps and this leaves the knife off balance / top heavy.

Another one of the negatives listed on the product reviews is that the bottom rack doesn’t stay out because the dishwasher door doesn’t open completely flat. No, the dishwasher door doesn’t lie completely flat, but it’s only a couple of degrees off it so the bottom rack may not stay the whole way out but it doesn’t roll the whole way back in, either – it moves in by an inch or two maybe. If you leave the top rack in, you can access all of the bottom rack without needing to pull the rack out again. Once you have some weight in the rack it stays more firmly in place though I did find I needed to be careful to roll the rack back into the body of the dishwasher properly as on one side the wheels pop off the runner easily.

The dishwasher has a delay cycle facility you can set to delay it going on by 3, 6 or 9 hours – my mum uses this function on her dishwasher for it to go on overnight, which I would do if the dishwasher made so much noise I couldn’t cope with it being on while I was downstairs, or if it was cheaper for me to run it overnight, but it doesn’t affect me either way so I won’t worry about that, but it’s a nice added feature. It offers Eco Mode, Intensive, Normal, 1Hr, Rapid and 3 in 1 wash cycles, all of which you can select and then use the ½ load button if required.

By far my favourite addition on the panel of buttons is the childlock option. You set the childlock on and whatever buttons get pushed after that just get ignored by the dishwasher. Since I’ve a four year old who LOVES fiddling with all things button related (especially with flashing red lights and beeping going on) this is a big bonus for me. It’s easy to set but I did find getting it right took a couple of attempts – You have to press two buttons at once, one of those buttons being the program selection, so I kept changing the program selection just before the childlock activated and then having to undo the childlock to change the program back! I need more co-ordination!

It did a washload yesterday and I was pleased with how things came out, using the Eco Mode program and it was quite full. The only thing was the deeper bottoms of some mugs still had water in them where the angle wasn’t quite enough for the water to run off over the depth of the lip. Not a massive deal really. Everything was clean and with the exception of the bottoms of those mugs everything was rinsed.

All in all, so far I am pleased with this dishwasher. It was a very good price, though the customer care could have been vastly improved with better contact, the text message was received with my time slot being very accurate, the delivery guys were polite, professional and quick, and so far the dishwasher has done what I want it to do. The instructions could be clearer for adjusting the top rack but it’s quite obvious once you think about it and for the cost in comparison to other products I think this is a decent product of the quality you would expect for an own-brand item vs brand name. You get various bits included – salt funnel, scoops for detergent etc – probably stuff you get as standard with a new dishwasher, but this is the first time I’ve had one from new!

Impressed with Curry’s product and the pricing, less impressed with their so-called customer ‘care’. Impressed with Know How’s delivery guys.

Good overall experience for me!

Love,

Mummy P

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