After having my first baby I felt totally lost when it came to how to dress. My wardrobe was filled with t-shirts that didn’t fit and worked best tucked into high waisted jeans, trousers that didn’t suit my new body shape and shirts that didn’t sit right on my broader shoulders. It felt like someone else’s wardrobe and it took me a really long time to let go of older items that didn’t work any more and find newer styles that felt right. To be honest I’m not sure I ever really got to a comfortable place with my style before getting pregnant again two years later; the pandemic and the ability to wear loungewear most days probably didn’t help. The reality is you’re pregnant for 10 months, which is almost a year and during that time all style goes out the window, well for me it does anyway. So here I am, three months postpartum after three and a half years of either being pregnant or confused about what to wear, and I think I’ve finally worked it out.

I can’t tell you why, but after my first baby I felt like I’d lost myself, but after my second I feel like I’ve found myself again. For the first time in years I look forward to buying clothes, to getting dressed and I don’t totally hate looking at photos of myself. Honestly I know this all sounds a bit shallow, and trust me I never thought or cared so much about this before but I think the mix of hormones and exhaustion just messes with you as a new parent and you crave a bit of self confidence. So what’s actually different this time? Because I still have a postpartum body and everything that comes with it, I still have the exhaustion… But maybe because it’s my second time the changes are less shocking, I was more prepared and the big wardrobe change has already happened so I have more options this time. Also call me old fashioned, I don’t know if this is actually true but the hormone imbalance I felt having a girl pregnancy and birth vs a boy one was SO different.

There’s also something to be said for just getting older and more confident in your own style choices. There’s something very freeing about having the confidence to wear what you feel comfortable in, instead of what you think you’re expected to wear.

So let me try to pin point the main changes in my wardrobe over the past few years as I’ve transitioned into a new lifestyle and a new body shape. The tighter graphic tees have been switched out for a more classic white tshirt with a bit more structure, slightly longer arms and longer in length allowing for a french tuck rather than fully tucked in. Other options instead of a graphic t-shirt would be a looser long sleeved top or a ribbed vest top layered under an oversized cardigan or linen shirt. The skinny jeans (although sometimes still worn with a longer oversized jumper) have been replaced with a more flattering straight leg jean, which kind of balances out my shape a bit more. I used to wear a lot of fine knit sweaters, but these days I find they just don’t sit comfortably on me and I prefer a heavier knit. I especially like if they have a zip neckline, to create a more flattering shape. I used to wear a lot of shorter jackets, but they make me look quite top heavy and so these days I prefer a longer line trench or wool coat.

Like I said, I feel totally different after this last pregnancy as I did the first time round so don’t be hard on yourself if you feel lost and like you no longer have a clue what to wear. It will come back! But in the meantime I found using Instagram really helpful for putting outfits together. It’s easy to get into a rut of wearing the same top and jeans combination, but all it takes is a few extra pieces to make an outfit feel more complete and to make you feel more confident in it. Save any outfits you see and like, then shop your wardrobe to see if you can recreate it.

Here are some of the newer pieces in my wardrobe that I’m loving. 

*ad- affiliate links used

Black Friday is almost here and if you’re reading this post it’s probably because you like the bits I pick for my home, you’re interested in what big baby buys I recommend and you want to be as comfy as I am in my loungewear every day. So, that’s what I’ve done this year. I’ll be compiling the best picks, in my opinion, from all of the sales so that you can decipher the unnecessary splurges from the money saving purchases you were already planning to make. So many of the sales start early this year so I’ll just keep updating this post for you to check back between now and Friday!

MY TOP PICKS

Missoma Gold Mini Tunnel Hoops – 25% off their entire site. These are my most worn earrings from this year but also check the style edit below for more of my faves!

BB Hug Me pregnancy pillow – 25% off. If you’re pregnant and you’ve been toying with the idea of investing in the BB Hug Me pregnancy pillow. DO IT! Best product ever, it got me through my pregnancy and I used it postpartum too to help me feed and get comfortable. I promise it’s worth it.

Diptyque “Best of Baies” Set –£25 off! Space NK are offering £25 off every £100 and that includes this gorgeous Diptyque set in my all time favourite scent!

Cowshed ‘The Awake Bathing Set’ –  20% off! Hands down the most relaxing, luxurious bath and body products around. Cowshed is the ultimate treat.

The Steamery Pilo Fabric Shaver – 30% off! The most satisfying way to keep your knits looking fresh.

GIFTS

PREGNANCY & NEWBORN

STYLE PICKS

HOME

Here’s a list of some of the discount codes you won’t want to miss out on

West Elm have 20% off their entire site (no code needed)

Selfridges have up to 20% off with code SELFCCE

Cowshed have 20% off on orders under £70, 25% off on orders between £75 and £100, 30% off on orders over £100

Missoma have 25% off the entire site

Mango have up to 50% off

H&M Home have 20% off everything for members

& Other Stories have 20% off everything today

ARKET (coming soon)

Glossier have 25% off everything and 35% off sets

Beauty Bay have up to 30% off selected lines

Space NK have £25 off every £100

Whistles have 25% off all full price items

Topshop currently have 30% off brands

ASOS have up to 50% off on selected lines OR 15% off the entire site if it’s your first shop with code ASOSNEWBIE

GHDs have 20% off all stylers

Junique have 25% off everything with the code BLK2020

This is also a good time to shop small, and here are some of my favourite small brands .

Inside Store London
for trendy home accessories

Prick Ldn
for cacti, succulents and pots

Workshop Living
scandi minimalism at it’s finest 

Marloweville

for the cutest kids stripey name tees

Kan Kan London
refillable hand soap
20% off their “near perfect” starter sets and they’ll be planting a tree for every one sold

Nude Ethics
illustrative embroidered clothing and prints

HAYGEN
for gorgeous home accessories

Scandiborn
for pretty kids things

Me+Em
they don’t have discounts but will be donating £10 from every order to The Prince’s Trust 

FINALLY… my absolute favourite time of year is here in terms of styling outfits. Summer is great and all, I’ll miss being able to spend time in the garden but I definitely will not miss having to have so much skin on show all the time. Is that just me being weird? I hate it. I’m all about the jeans and knitted jumpers! By November we’ll all be complaining about having to wear a huge coat every day because it’s freezing and Spring will seem so far away, but for the next couple of months it’s that perfect in-between weather where we can wear a jumper and no coat, ankle socks with our trainers and we don’t have to layer a thermal vest top under every single outfit. I’m giddy with excitement.

So here are some of the items that I’m excited to wear this Autumn whether that’s just at home, for a walk in the park or for a social distanced meet up with friends. How 2020.

 

Five out of seven days a week you’ll find me wearing joggers, they’re just so comfortable and practical. But I still want to feel put together and not like I want to crawl back into bed for a midday nap. There’s a whole category of joggers that I’ve discovered this year that are more fitted, made from nicer material and are the perfect in-between of a trouser and a jogger. Paired with a tucked in t-shirt and trainers, it’s my favourite look.

JOGGERS

I’m VERY excited for chunky black boot season but we have months of being able to wear them, so for now I’m going to enjoy wearing trainers whilst I still can, my favourite shoe choice. I have an unhealthy trainer addiction but I DO wear them everyday. If you’re a mum, go for a pair with velcro… you can thank me later.

TRAINERS

KNITWEAR

Knitwear for Autumn… ground breaking. But I’m here for it. Sweater weather is the best, whether it’s a cashmere knit, a chunkier knit or a waffle knit (I’m obsessed with waffle knit at the mo). Here’s my edit of the best knits around right now. Side note, I also can’t stop buying waffle knits for Grey (check Zara kids!).

Autumn… bring.it.on.

Is anyone here? Sorry… it’s been a while. Hopefully those of you who used to read my blog back when I regularly posted will now be following me on Instagram and YouTube, the two platforms I find myself on most of the time these days. If you do you’ll know that I now have a one year old daughter! Wtf. I know.

The past year has been such a crazy experience and despite being an auntie five times over and thinking I knew what to expect, I was so wrong… I had no idea. I thought sleep deprivation would be the hardest part, but in reality I just adjusted and got used to having less sleep. I thought all the mum stuff would be tricky; like knowing how to soothe her or dealing with the constant crying, you know, like what you see in the films. She’s actually been a dream and has been a very calm baby since day one; she knew what she wanted and she totally taught us what to do, so it kind of came more naturally to us than I had expected.

But the parts I found the hardest were more to do with me and less about her. Beforehand I didn’t even worry about how I’d feel about my post-partum body because I really didn’t think it would bother me, but wow… it affected me more than I thought it would. I felt proud of what my body had achieved and I wanted to to let it heal and take it’s time, but equally I felt like I was living in someone else’s body and I genuinely felt uncomfortable. Not being able to wear clothes that felt like ‘me’ and not really being able to shop for new ones either, and at the beginning when breastfeeding that feeling that your body doesn’t even belong to you but to someone else is bizarre. Looking back at photos of the few first months, I don’t even look like me. Post-partum hair meant it was thicker, longer and so dark, everything about me just looks different. I also found the work/mum life balance very hard to deal with and I felt scared and worried about the career I’d worked so hard to create… would I be able to come back and work in the same way I did before? Will people wait for me? Will I even want to go back to work?! Without any maternity leave or example to lead by I felt alone in my worries despite the support and encouragement to take the time off. Before having a baby I just thought you could work from home with your baby in a rocker beside you, oh how wrong I was. I hadn’t considered the fact that your mum brain and your work brain are two very different things and they don’t work well alongside each other. I had one bad day when I first went back to work, I learnt from it and then never tried to work whilst looking after her at the same time ever again. Mum guilt is a real thing I’ll tell you that.

What shocked me the most from the past year was how much I enjoyed it. I always wanted to be a mum, it was never something I doubted but I was never obsessed with the idea of being a mum and I didn’t spend time dreaming about how it would be. I think I just spent years worrying about giving birth and the logistics of having a baby incorporated into our life… so it shocked and overwhelmed me when I realised how amazing it felt. And as quite a sarcastic and cynical person I was surprised at how gushy I had become and how positive I felt about the whole experience. For the first time I didn’t feel like pointing out the negative or warning people off the idea, I wanted everyone to know how happy I was. It was a brand new feeling to me, that’s for sure. I feel like people rarely talk about the ‘best bits’ when it comes to motherhood, maybe it’s an English thing? All you really hear about is how hard it is. Yes maybe there are days you’re exhausted or just want to cry, but I’m pretty sure there’s been a moment everyday where I’ve laughed too… and I didn’t laugh daily before having her. The feeling of love and pride is unlike anything you would have ever felt and it makes everything else seem irrelevant. Someone commented on my Instagram post today saying having a child felt like their heart was constantly outside their body – perfectly put.

I wish I hadn’t spent so many years scared of giving birth, or putting off the idea until I had certain things in place or had been to various places first. But also who knows if I would have had the same experience or felt the same way if the timings were different. I feel so grateful and I know that I’m so lucky, I don’t forget that for a minute. My life is different now, but so much better. I haven’t yet got the work balance thing right, but having her has put so many things in perspective and I no longer feel FOMO or jealousy of others. I’ve learnt to be more present and enjoy the moment and I can’t wait to see what the next year brings.

Thanks for following along for the past year and for all your supportive comments. I’ll try not to wait another year to post on here again, no promises.

Despite being told left, right and centre that newborn babies really don’t need much stuff, it’s impossible not to get sucked into the world of baby shopping and it can be really quite overwhelming! On one hand I know that a newborn doesn’t need all the stuff, but on the other I feel like you only have your first baby once and there’s no harm enjoying that. So I feel like I’ve been somewhere in the middle when it comes to shopping. I’m letting myself enjoy the process and buy a few unnecessary bits just because they’re cute, but I’m also trying to be practical and not go too over the top. In fact one of my tactics has been, instead of asking friends and family what I should be buying, I’ve been asking what was the one thing they bought that they ended up not needing or using. Of course you have to factor in that every baby is totally different and what works for one might not work for another, and that’s something no-one knows until the time comes.

I think it’s quite common for people in the UK to start thinking about shopping after their 20 week scan, so that’s what we did and we didn’t jump in head first, we eased our way in. I started by researching online and chatting to friends and family. Compiling a Google list that Rich and I could both log into and edit helped me get my head around it and stopped me impulse buying every time I saw something cute. In fact we didn’t even go into a shop until I was maybe 23 weeks. I’m aware that a baby doesn’t go into it’s own bedroom right at the beginning, but we didn’t want to be decorating and sorting out a room with a newborn so that’s something we wanted to sort beforehand. I gave Rich some specific jobs so that he could be involved and know exactly how he could help, so he was in charge of researching things like baby monitors, cot mattress and baby slings.

*UPDATE*

Hello, Lily post-baby talking now… I was almost spot-on with all of my purchases, but since actually having a baby myself I’ve learnt so much and I thought I’d update this blog post and share a much more experience based checklist. Of course these are not essentials and everyone’s budget will be totally different, so feel free to adapt the list to what you need. This is just what I send my girlfriends when they ask me, and so I thought I’d make it public! As you’ll see on the checklist there’s an A and a B list, because not everything is needed for the first few weeks when a baby is a newborn. I found it really helpful to do all my research when pregnant and have all my links ready to go for when I needed to make the purchases, but to not buy the items until I needed them and it spread out the costs a bit too.

Click the link below to download my newborn “essentials” checklist. 

NEWBORN SHOPPING LIST

Watch the video where I talk in more detail about the specific products I used and liked below. 

NEWBORN ESSENTIALS VIDEO

SHOP SOME OF MY FAVOURITES HERE

Photos by Emma Croman

When it comes to getting pregnant, maternity style was the last thing on my mind. I spent years freaking out about the idea of giving birth, I then started trying and spent months freaking out about not being able to conceive and then when it happened I was over the moon/very sick in my first trimester. At no point had I really considered how my changing body shape would affect me, because honestly I wasn’t that into my body beforehand anyway. But actually, at 31 years old I had finally worked out my personal style and how to dress comfortably whilst still feeling stylish. Well getting pregnant changed everything, from 10 weeks I couldn’t fit into my straight leg high waisted jeans and wearing maternity jeans (when trying to hide the fact you’re pregnant) meant my top tucked in look was also out the window.

I spent week 10 to 17 wearing loose tops/jumpers with skinny maternity jeans, a look I wore a lot a few years back but I missed the enjoyment of picking an outfit out, putting it on and feeling confident going out in it. Getting dressed felt like just a way of avoiding being naked and I felt absolutely no joy in my wardrobe. I realised that opening my wardrobe doors to find all my old clothes that I could no longer wear was really not helping the situation, so Anna came over to help me put all the clothes that no longer fit me in storage to make room for a new maternity appropriate wardrobe. From then on I decided that just floating my way through pregnancy wearing old oversized clothes was a) not going to make me feel great and b) be quite tricky with my job.

Maternity clothing has quite a bad rep for a few different reasons. People often feel like investing in clothes that are only appropriate for a small space of time is unnecessary and often maternity clothing can be pretty dull; striped tops, dungarees and not much else really. I guess with your first baby you’re more likely to invest as you can hopefully store the clothes for the next time but still, it is a bit frustrating to have to re-do your wardrobe when you were very happy with how it was before. I do think though that the investment isn’t just in the clothes, it’s an investment in your happiness and in feeling good throughout your pregnancy which is so important. It’s a testing time with all those new hormones saying around so a nice new top or pair of jeans can’t hurt really.

Finding the right maternity jeans made all the difference to me. My old straight leg style no longer worked so I went back to skinny and despite feeling quite 2016 it just works better. Everyone seems to have their own preference on under the bump or over the bump, but I find over the bump cuts in less and helps hold in the bump in quite a comforting way. I get to the end of the day and just HAVE to take them off before I suffocate, but I think that’s just being pregnant. At the beginning I wore jeans with just a stretchy side panel, I then moved to under the bump and now I’m a fully converted over the bump-er.

Depending on how confident you are with your bump, a tight top can be really flattering. It’s so strange, you spend so much of your life trying to hide your tummy area and enhance other more flattering parts of your body, but then you get pregnant and actually it can look better to just embrace the bump. When I wear tight tops I get a lot of “oh you’ve grown”, or “ooh you’re nearly there” comments, whereas sometimes if I just wear a normal loose top people say “ooh you’re so tiny” or “where’s your bump”, so just be prepared for the conflicting opinions based on your clothing choice of the day. But being pregnant is amazing and sometimes you just wanna wear your bump loud and proud and a stretchy, tight top is perfect for that.

I’ve found maternity shopping quite frustrating as I’m someone who loves to shop in stores and try things on, I’ve always been in between sizes. Turns out most the brands who are known to have good maternity only stock it online! So I’ve done plenty or ordering, trying on and then having to return over the past few months. Places I’ve enjoyed shopping are ASOS, Zara, Topshop (who actually do have a store in town), Seraphine and H&M. I have also been very lucky to be pregnant in the winter, I have no idea how I would have managed with the heat and what to wear in the height of summer.

So to wrap this up I’m going to leave you with some of my top picks over a few different categories. What’s worked well for me has been long tops, skinny jeans, dungarees (cliche but there’s a reason) and cardigans with vest tops. I still don’t really feel like ‘me’ and I know it’ll only get harder as my bump gets bigger but it’s all for an amazing reason and I know I can go back to enjoying a tucked in top and high waisted jeans one day!

JEANS

TOPS

OTHER

Photos by Emma Croman

Worn in post:
PR Gift | Seraphine Grey Button Jumper – link
Zara Blue & White Striped Top
PR Gift | Reiss Green Coat
Gucci Soho Disco Bag – link
PR Gift | & Other Stories Blue Jumper – link
Zara Black Linen Trousers
Gucci Sling-Back Loafers
Seraphine Parka Coat – link