Nothing frees up your time like being told you have to stay on bed rest for the remainder of your pregnancy, and if you don’t have enough distractions you can quickly find yourself bored out of your mind. Of course you can play your favorite games like Words with Friends or Wheel of Fortune, but after a while even those will lose their luster, and you’ll need something else to occupy your hours.
Here are 6 iPhone applications that will help take up some time and answer any questions you may have regarding concerns about the baby that may pop into your head while you are lying in bed. There’s an app for everything from saving for college to listening to the baby’s heartbeat:
1. CollegeSave This application allows you to do the calculations to determine how much per month you will need to save in order to pay for your child’s college tuition. If you start early then you will have the advantage of compounding interest and you won’t have to put as much away each month versus starting when your child is 10.
2. Soundhound Ever been bored and start humming a song and wish you knew what the song was? With this application you can hum a few bars and it will use its vast library of over a million tunes to identify the song. Want to come up with a bunch of lullabies for your baby? This application can help with that.
3. iPregnancy Want to know what’s going on inside your body at this very moment? iPregnancy tells you how big the baby should be, what’s going on physically with the baby, keeps track of appointments and has a great baby name function to help you figure out what you are going to name your little peanut when the time comes.
4. ZipList You may be on bed rest, but the rest of the family still needs to eat. Don’t feel like you have to rely on your partner to handle everything with this application. Now you can look up recipes, create a grocery list, sort the items on the list by aisle in the store, and then text everything to someone else to run to the store for you. If your family runs out of anything they can scan the barcode using this application and it will automatically be added to the list.
5. My Baby’s Beat With this application you can actually use the microphone on your iPhone to hear your baby’s heart beat and your own. You can record the heart beat and e-mail it to
6. After Baby is born: BabyTimer This application allows you to keep track of the number of wet and dirty diapers your baby has each day. It also keeps track of feedings so that you can report all of this information back to your pediatrician.
Good luck moms!