If You're Pregnant get I'm Pregnant! (I'm Pregnant!)

Member Name: lemontiger

Product:	I'm Pregnant!
Date:	21/03/09 (120 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good value, lots of help choosing your essentials

Disadvantages: More expensive than the average magazine

I am pregnant and eventhough I always thought I would buy loads of magazines during my pregnancy, I have actually only bought 3. The first magazine I bought when I was about 12 weeks,scared me to death with lots of horror stories about later pregnancy and birth! I might write a review of that another time! I found very little for me inside that magazine everything felt just so far away. One magazine I later bought was for a free travel changing pad and I didn't even read the magazine.

I decided to give I'm Pregnant! a try because it had some potentially useful bits as I flicked through in the shops, especially a number of double page spreads featuring the essential items we were going to need including baths, changing things, breast pumps, pushchairs, bottles, toys etc. I was about 20 weeks and we hadn't bought anything at all. These all showed a really wide range with prices and many with top features. Most of these sections had a few pages with advice on choosing a certain item such as a car seat- weights, head huggers, washable covers then a selection of items themselves. These gave us a good idea of what to look for when we made our own purchases and in a few cases we did buy what we saw in the magazine. One or two of these however did seem kind of adverty- mainly the travel systems one.

In the magazine I bought, there were significant sections in the magazine on 'Your Pregnancy' with features I found useful including morning sickness, eating, relationships, scans, tests, pelvic floor. Also 'Labour, Birth and Beyond' and I found the stem cells, breastfeeding, TENS, newborn checks sections really useful for questions I had. The views in all of the articles seem very balanced and where there are individual's stories they are written as honest but balanced reviews. If someone had a really bad experience they also have something about people who had a good experience so you can hear both sides of the story. I found this was the complete opposite of previous magazines which was really useful for me and provided me with a much better experience. There's even a useful glossary of terms at the back which is great when you're not sure what all the terminology means.

There is an 11 page section within the magazine for dads and my husband decided to read and said he had found it useful. He said it had given him lots of tips, especially for labour and afterwards. To be honest though, I didn't read this as I wanted him to have some knowledge for himself which he could share with me later if he chose to.

There was a giveaway on the front of my magazine (a bottle to send away for plus p&p) as well as giveaways inside which could be entered by text/ post. The price of the magazine was £4.99 but it is only a four times a year magazine, not a monthly one. As I found most magazines for pregnancy are £2-3.50, I think this represents best value for money considering the 315 pages. However as you can expect with all magazines, some of these are adverts- I counted about 30 pages worth. Less than a lot of expensive women's magazines, which I'm not a fan of either.

I would recommend this magazine, especially if you're looking to buy maybe just one or two with lots of information and practical tips. I found it represented good value for money although I'm not sure whether I would buy the next one- I've only 6 weeks to go and we've more or less bought everything we need now and that was definitely the best part of it for me as that's what I needed at that time.

Summary: Good all round value with helpful advice and information