Baby's First Year

Rating:
Summary: a fun and low-stress way to mark the first year
Review: I highly recommend this calendar or one like it for you and for all your pregnant friends. I never could get around to keeping one of those pre-fabricated "baby's first year" journals, but this calendar is easy, flexible, and fun to keep. Especially nice are the make-your-own stickers to supplement the many stickers they include. We added, for example, "first airplane trip," "first bike ride," and, unfortunately, "first headcold."

Rating:
Summary: a fun and low-stress way to mark the first year
Review: I highly recommend this calendar or one like it for you and for all your pregnant friends. I never could get around to keeping one of those pre-fabricated "baby's first year" journals, but this calendar is easy, flexible, and fun to keep. Especially nice are the make-your-own stickers to supplement the many stickers they include. We added, for example, "first airplane trip," "first bike ride," and, unfortunately, "first headcold."

Rating:
Summary: TERRIBLE!! Do not buy this calendar!
Review: This calendar is unbelievably bad -- who would have thought they could botch such a simple concept?!

Two reasons it's not worth your money: first, the calendar portion only gives you 28 days for each month! Now, we all know that *technically speaking* a month is only 28 days, but I want the page labeled "my first month" to include the complete month from my baby's birthday on March 27 up to April 26. With this format, "my first month" would be March 27 to April 23... and I'd run out of day squares on the calendar before I even got to my baby's 11-month birthday!

The other thing, which is not nearly as bad (but still pretty annoyng) is that the top half of each calendar page is a set of fill-in-the-blanks that is EXACTLY the same for every month -- "I've been eating _____" and "My favorite toys are _____" and "My favorite games are _______" and "My favorite songs are ______" - to name just a few. A one-month-old baby does not play with toys! Or have favorite songs! Sure, you can stretch the truth a bit... say his favorite toy is the mobile in the crib, his favorite song is one you sing to him occasionally... but you can't do that month after month. It would have been much better if that top portion of the calendar had just been a picture from "Goodnight Moon" or "The Runaway Bunny," as I assumed when I bought it.

OK, so the imagery is nice - but frankly, they actually could have done a better job with that, too... it's not as sweet and cute as I would have imagined. And the stickers were a let-down, too: it says it comes with 56 stickers, but there are really only 42 (the others are blank colored circles).

A much, much, MUCH better option is the Peter Rabbit baby's first year calendar - adorable and well-designed. Buy that instead!