Karen Dixon

I am Karen, and I have one child, a diary that is mostly optimistic, and a fridge covered in paper.

The habit started before she did. It took us several rounds of IVF to get here, and IVF is, among many other things, an enormous amount of recording. Injections at fixed times. Medications that change on a Tuesday and change back on a Friday. Scan dates, blood test dates, results to write down, questions to remember for the next appointment and then forget the moment you sit down in it.

None of the sheets I was given quite matched how any of it actually ran, so I started making my own. Then I started making them properly, because a tracker you have redrawn four times eventually becomes a thing you know how to design.

By the time our daughter arrived I already had the habit, and the same problem in a new form: I kept finding exactly the chart I needed and then hitting a payment page, or a sign-up form, or a download stamped with somebody else’s watermark across the middle of it. Two pounds here, an email address there. For a sheet of A4.

So I made those too, sized for A4 rather than American paper, and put them somewhere other people could find them. That is the whole of it.

I am not a doctor, a midwife, a health visitor or a teacher, and I am careful to say so. Where something on this site touches health or school, it follows NHS, Food Standards Agency or Department for Education guidance, it says where that guidance came from, and it tells you to speak to somebody qualified. The rest is one parent writing down what worked.

Why the sheets look the way they do

Anyone who has been through fertility treatment will recognise the particular flavour of admin that comes with it. Not difficult, exactly. Relentless. A dose at the same time every evening, a schedule that changes without warning, a folder of appointment letters, and the certainty that somebody will ask you a question you cannot answer from memory.

What I learned in those years is in almost everything here. Write it down at the time rather than afterwards, because afterwards never comes. Put the record where the thing happens, not in a drawer. Leave enough space to write properly, because nobody fills in a box designed for tidy handwriting at four in the morning. And make the sheet answer the question somebody is going to ask you, rather than the question that looks neat on paper.

The newborn logs, the medication record and the allergen tracker are all that habit, pointed at something else.

What I actually know about

Nappies at four in the morning. Potty training that goes backwards the week nursery starts. Reading logs abandoned by half term. What a hospital bag genuinely needs in it, which is less than the lists suggest and more phone chargers than you would think.

I know how much ink a colour chart uses, because I have watched a cartridge give up halfway through one. I know the sticker has to go on immediately or it means nothing to a two year old. I know the best planner is the one somebody else in the house can read without asking.

What I do not know about

Anything clinical. I am not a doctor, midwife, health visitor, dietitian or teacher, and nothing here should be read as though I were.

Where a page touches health or school, it follows published guidance from the NHS, the Food Standards Agency, the Lullaby Trust or the Department for Education, it says on the page where that came from, and it points you to somebody qualified to answer. That is a deliberate line and I do not cross it.

Tell me what is missing

If you keep looking for a printable and cannot find it, email me at [email protected]. Requests genuinely shape what gets made next, and a fair amount of what is on the site now started as somebody asking for it.