What are boobs for?

Eating out at lunchtime is not a regular event. What with the number of highchairs required and the need to work around The Routine, it's simply easier to stay at home. From time to time, however, the call of the skinny latte is too strong for me to resist, and I load up the triple buggy and head into town.

I had planned to go to the park this morning, but woke to the sound of rain and my heart sank. Rain is the Multiple Mum's nemesis. We don't care if it's cold, or if the wind is whipping round us, Wizard of Oz style. We don't care if the sun's beating down or just peeking through the clouds. All these weather events can be combatted with sunshields, with extra layers, hats and scarves. In my (very short) time as a mother of one, the rain was really no problem; a cover on the Maclaren and a raincoat for me, and we carried on regardless. Nowadays rain presents logistical difficulties that stop short of 'fun'. Three children means three trips from the house to the buggy or car. That's three occasions to get wet, and tramp muddy footprints back into the hall. The babies sit tight in their buggy seats, the raincover already steaming up, but they are at least dry. The Toddler is forced to ride high on his toddler seat, three feet closer to the rain clouds, with no more protection against the elements than the hood of his coat. None of us enjoys it.

So we stay indoors on wet days, and this morning was no exception. I racked my brains for rainy-day activities. We built lego towns, read books, made a cardboard house and painted it with handprints. We sang songs, did the hokey-cokey, played musical instruments, had a teddy bears' picnic and practiced marching. We played with dried pasta, made cookies, ate strawberries and led a treasure hunt through the house. A busy schedule, and I was beginning to flag. I looked at my watch: 8.45am.

When the rain dried up a couple of hours later, and the sun broke through the clouds in a grudging reprieve for we tired mothers, I abandoned routine and told the children I was taking them out for lunch. With great excitement we tumbled into the only cafe in town with a wide enough front door and enough back-ground noise not to mind our chaotic chatter. Food order placed, the babies were happily chasing raisins round the table when the Toddler turned to me and placed his hands firmly on my bosoms;

"Mummy, are they boobs?"

(I will forgive his uncertainty - my post-natal chest has little in common with the traditional female form).

"Yes darling". I handed him a sachet of tomato ketchup and challenged him to open it with his teeth. It was a desperate move, but even that failed to distract him;

"What are they for?"

Hmm, good question. Around us, other customers stared meaningfully into their cups of coffee as their ears strain to catch my answer. A waiter paused, mid-order, his pen hovering above his pad. You could have heard a pin drop. Would I seize the opportunity to explain to my two year old about the wonders of nourishing babies?

"Well," I stammered, "They're just for looking at, really"

The man at the next table snorted into his cappucino.

A hundred years of feminism undone.

Baby Led Weaning

I hate weaning. I was momentarily excited by my very first batch of steaming, blending, freezing and labelling, but it soon lost its appeal when my G&T was presented with a slice but no ice - the freezer section given over to Annabelle Karmel’s finest pea and pear puree.

During my second pregnancy I read up on Baby Led Weaning (BLW) and vowed to follow its philosophy and consign my blender to the cupboard. The basic philosophy is as follows; skip the puree, the mash, the gradual transition to lumpy food, and simply present your baby with a selection of whole foods to play with. Gill Rapley, a BLW ‘guru’, explodes the myths surrounding conventional weaning, claiming that now that the Government guidelines are to wean at six months (previously babies have been weaned at 16 weeks, and as early as 12 weeks) there is no argument for giving purees, as babies have by then gained the necessary ability to handle food and to chew.

When my twins were just over four months old, my health visitor advised weaning them, as they were failing to thrive on milk alone. Later on, this poor weight gain was attributed to a medical condition, however at the time it was a reasonable suggestion to make. I duly presented my girls with spoonfuls of mush. They weren’t interested, it disrupted their routine – and mine – and my toddler began demanding baby food in place of his usual meals. It was a disaster and I stopped after a week.

So at six months I began sitting the babies at the table while we ate, giving them chunks of fruit, steamed vegetables and bread with humous or jam. At first they weren’t interested at all, then they wanted to eat but didn’t have the co-ordination to match – that was frustrating! Gradually their motor skills improved, along with their appetites, and by seven months they were doing pretty well.

At that stage a typical day would start with toast, shredded wheat and fruit. Lunch and supper would be whatever their big brother was having, which was in turn whatever we had eaten the previous night! The babies would tuck happily into handfuls of spaghetti bolognaise, scrambled egg (overcooked till it’s a bit rubbery and easy to eat with fingers), or chunks of chicken and steamed veg. By eight months they happily handled whole sausages or pieces of beef casserole, and it was fantastic to see their fine motor skills developing, till they were able to catch the peas they were chasing round the table.

Since then I’ve abandoned some of the principles of baby-led weaning; I use a spoon, for a start – there is a limit to the amount of mess I can handle! Baby Led Weaning isn’t for everyone, and I’m not sure I would have had the confidence to have done it the first time around. You have to be happy with the knowledge that your child is getting everything they need from milk; in their first year food is simply about exploring tastes and textures. You also have to be prepared for the mess! I swiftly abandoned my fabric-lined high-chairs and bought Ikea’s plastic ones which are beautifully stackable and easy to wipe clean. But it’s surprising how quickly they learned to eat well, and I’ve found the weaning process so much fun this time around.

The benefits of BLW for me have been enormous; I have never had to cook separate food for the babies, or mess around with blenders and freezer bags. I rarely take food out and about with me, as from six months they’ve always been able to grab a sandwich with me, or eat a banana, despite still having no teeth at a year old! Surprisingly perhaps, I have had far fewer gagging/choking incidents with BLW, then when I weaned my son onto purees. Gill Rapley explains that purees encourage babies to ‘suck’ the food off the spoon; something much more likely to result in food going down the wrong way, than when a baby self-feeds. With three children under 2 to feed, mealtimes were pretty chaotic, so it was a tremendous benefit to teach the girls to feed themselves from the outset, leaving my hands free to load the dishwasher, or even have a cup of tea myself!

Identity crisis

There are times when I worry I will disappear entirely under the weight of identities I carry about me as I weave through life. First and foremost I bear the badge of Motherhood, and although the toddler cries of ‘Mu-mmy!’ will in time give way to teenage grunts of ‘Mum!’, my identity will never change. There are faux-enthusiastic greetings from other women on the baby-circuit, who know me only as ‘the twins’ mother’. The midwives on the post-natal ward never bothered to check my chart; “How’s Mum today?”; “Come on Mum, let’s get those stitches checked”. Even my own mother has succombed to this sickly sweet trend, addressing me as ‘Mummy’ when my children are in the room. In second place I’m a wife, refered to as such by my husband’s colleagues, his family and the double-glazing salesman who hopefully calls every now and then. At varying times I’m a Treasurer, Secretary, Volunteer, Customer or Boss. Some of these roles carry respect, some derision.

My husband and I so rarely use our first names that it is a shock when, in the presence of visitors, he eschews ‘honey’, ‘darling’ and ‘trout-face’ in favour of ‘Emily’. It sounds clumsy on his lips; as though he’s talking about a stranger. And that’s who I have become – a stranger to myself. Floating somewhere beneath the Daughter, the Sister, the Mother, the Friend, the Wife and the Worker, is the girl who loved to dance, to act, to sing and to write. The girl who grew up with a passion for the theatre and a zest for life. The girl who fell in love, married and travelled though a lifetime of broken hearts to find her family. The girl who loves her job, still dances, and counts her blessings as she kisses her children good-night.

Who is she? It’s time to find her again.

Book review: Instructions not included, by Charlotte Moerman

Those lovely people at Virgin books are forgiven for sending me The One I Hated, because they also sent me this one; The One I Really Quite Enjoyed. I knew I’d like it as soon as I saw that (despite its mom-lit credentials) the cover wasn’t pink with swirly writing and a graphic of a high heeled shoe impaled in a dirty nappy. More importantly, Charlotte Moerman is actually me. Well ok, she might dispute that, but basically we are interchangeable. She may have three boys to my 1:2 boy:girl ratio, but that’s pretty similar. She married a Dutchman, I married a Scotsman. Her blog was plucked from obscurity to become a shiny hardback book, and mine.... hmm, ok, well maybe we’re not quite the same.

The fact remains that Charlotte (I feel as though we’re on first name terms, now that we’ve met properly through British Mummy Bloggers) is really quite normal. She doesn’t have an affair with an ex-colleague, then realise the grass really was greener at home after all. She doesn’t manage a multi-million dollar business whilst looking fantastic and wearing her children in a hand-woven papoose. She just muddles through life with her boys, her absent (hard-working, not deserting) husband, and her quirky sense of humour.

The book encompasses Charlotte’s family life from early pregnancy with her first child, to the day that boy starts school, throwing in a couple more babies in the middle. I couldn’t help but feel it was a bit of a gallop, and I could have done with her pausing for breath in the middle and allowing me to catch up. It was rather like going out for a drink with a favourite old school friend you rarely see, with five years of gossip to catch up on. Confusing chronological leaps between friends can be easily sorted over a leisurely G&T with a, “so was that before he vommed on the cat, or after?”, but I was left flicking back pages to check which stage we were at. Even without knowing the author’s history as a successful blogger, I’d have hazarded a guess that this was a blog-to-book venture; it has a slightly disjointed, episodic feel to it, with (extremely amusing) Bridget Jones-esque fantasy breaks here and there. But such criticism is all rather mundane and structural and it would be churlish to allow these nit-picks to detract from Charlotte’s excellent writing which is fresh, chatty and amusing. I genuinely enjoyed reading her book, and laughed out loud on several occasions, causing much consternation from my husband (the dour Scotsman, remember?)

Just as we found out What Katy did Next, I’m looking forward to seeing where Charlotte goes now. I almost feel there were two books to be written out of Instructions not included; firstly the plot-based story of her own family and the challenges of moving from full-time career girl to full-time mum, and secondly a dip-in-and-out humourous guide to parenting, encompassing all the quirky asides hidden in her first book, which sometimes get lost in the reader’s need to follow the story.

I do hope there’s another book in Mrs Moerman; her writing deserves another outing.

Baby talk

If you were teaching someone a foreign language, would you write down the proper word on the blackboard, or a made-up one of your choosing? Would you require them to end each noun with the letter ‘y’, regardless of the actual spelling? Then why, oh why, do you insist on talking to my children about the nice doggy, the ickle fishy, the pretty dolly, and the bloody horsey?

Why is a car a ‘brum-brum’ and an ambulance a ‘nee-naw’?

Do I really have to change my baby’s ‘botty’?

I mean seriously, what is wrong with teaching our children proper English from the outset? I loathe baby talk with the fury of a thousand dirty nappies, and have refused point-blank to allow it in the house. There is plenty of time for our children to murder our beautiful language with the slang of teenage grunts and txt spk. For their first few speaking years, at least, can’t we teach them the beauty of real words, without patronising them with baby language?

My personal pet hate is the teaching of the word ‘ta’ to babes in arms. Perhaps if ‘ta’ is a term you use yourself, it is understandable that your child will learn it too, although I still shudder at the thought. But what I simply can’t understand is educated parents who would no sooner say ‘ta’ for their tea than they would hang leopard-print dice from the rear-view mirror of their Range Rover. It’s not a proper word! What’s wrong with thank you? Or thanks? How is that harder to say than ‘ta’? A ten month old might not enunciate her consonants as well as Eliza Doolittle, but she’ll have a damn good stab at it.

The fact that I’m a snob is well established, and I make no apologies for it. I want my children to grow up using decent English and I believe it’s important for our heritage and our self-respect as a nation that we encourage the next generation to cherish their language. After all, it’s a gift. Innit?

Photo credit: Karmalize