Guest Post: Making Food Fun - Healthy Snacks and How to Make Them

This guest post comes to you from the lovely Lily Helitzer. Full of great ideas for getting kids into different sorts of food, this article covers breakfast, lunch and dinner. Hope y'all enjoy! Will let you know how we get on with the 'pancake pen'.

With the summer holidays upon us, many parents are faced with the task of doing two things that their children’s teachers and dinner ladies are usually responsible for: occupying them and feeding them. However with a little bit of initiative and forward planning, you can combine these two by enlisting the kids help in creating their own meals. This will keep them entertained whilst simultaneously teaching them basic cooking skills and giving them an understanding of healthy, nutritional foods. Here are some ideas to give you inspiration on how to make meal times more fun, how to make healthy foods more appealing and how to enable your little ones to create culinary masterpieces that they can enjoy making as much as eating.

Breakfast
Presentation is everything so to make a healthy breakfast seem more enticing to your little ones by layering granola and yogurt into a Sundae glass. Top with chopped fruit and sprinkles to make their healthy breakfast look just like a sweet treat.

To encourage the kids to help prepare pancakes, why not let them create their very own ‘pancake pen’ instead of using a traditional ladle. By putting the pancake batter into an old ketchup bottle (or another similar squirty bottle) they can draw letters and shapes onto the griddle to make customised pancakes. When they’re done they can even decorate them with syrups, sauces and fruit. Voila!

Breakfast wraps are also great for kids to enjoy on the go. Spoon scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon into a tortilla and let them take them outdoors to enjoy. It’s an easy way to give them a filling, cooked breakfast on the go.

Lunch
Homemade pizzas are great fun for kids to make and whilst they’re perhaps not the healthiest meal in the world, you can certainly adapt them to include a variety of vegetables as toppings. To make pizza prep fun for the kids, encourage them to see their pizza base as a blank canvas that they can decorate with all of their favourite toppings. Spinach could become trees, ham slices could become a goofy smile and pepperoni could become a football. The possibilities are endless. The only problem is that they may not want to eat their pizza paintings after all of that hard work!

Alphabet noodles are cheap, easy to prepare and a great way of making a variety of soups more fun. Simply boil them up and add them to chicken, beef or vegetable soup and let the kids go wild with their spelling.

Sometimes the easiest thing to rustle up for lunch is a simple sandwich. But don’t just stick with boring cheese or salad. Why not try a ‘fruit’ sandwich by mixing chopped pineapple and dried fruits into cottage cheese for an exciting, different taste that gives the kids at least one of their 5 a day.

Dinner
Let the kids stare in amazement (and horror) as you coat their steaks or chops in blackcurrant jam or marmalade. They may think it looks disgusting but when they are grilled the fruity flavours work brilliantly alongside the meat. Serve with vegetables and mashed potatoes for an interestingly, healthy dinner.

Encourage the kids to use their initiative and the knowledge they’ve learnt about cooking to create their own twists on culinary classics. Start with a base dish (such as stew or macaroni cheese – these are suitable because almost anything can be added to them and they’ll still be edible!) and give the kids free reign about what they want to add. Anything from sea food, to fruit to red meat can be added to macaroni cheese and it can also be served in a variety of different ways – in a cocktail, a pie or even deep fried. Let the kids go wild and offer a prize for the best creation to spice things up a little!

For those warm summer evenings, it’s great to get the kids interested in salads. There are so many healthy and colourful ingredients that you can add to a salad to make it bright and interesting. Think outside of the box (or bowl in this case) and encourage the kids to make salad on a stick by adding feta cheese, cherry tomatoes, olives and celery to a stick in a kebab style. Using strawberries, blueberries and exotic fruits within salads can also add colour and flavour.

Refreshing Snacks
The kids will love watermelon carving which is, unsurprisingly, just like pumpkin carving. Only unlike pumpkin carving, they’ll probably be a lot more eager to eat the leftovers!

Homemade ice lollies are also a summer favourite and can be made from a variety of fruit juices and fizzy drinks. You can even buy lolly moulds that allow you to make multi flavour lollies!

Finally why not try making your own lemonade by squeezing the juice of 3 lemons into a mixture of five cups of water and one cup of sugar. Then add ice and leave to refrigerate for a fruity, refreshing drink.

Lily Helitzer is a health and nutrition writer who works on behalf of Kwikmed, an FDA-approved pharmacy which offers an accessible and safe outlet to buy Cialis and other prescription medication.

Touch and Feel, 'I'd like to be a Princess' - Igloo books

It probably comes as little surprise that I am not a 'Princess' sort of a girl. And I have to admit that when Daughter was given a copy of I'd like to be a Princess, I did turn my nose up a little on account of the sheer... pinkness of the thing.

But actually, just because I'm not a fan of all things fluffy and girlie, that doesn't mean that this isn't a great book. The texture of the things included for little people to feel is quite different from the standard stories in this genre and Daughter particularly likes the lace of the wedding scene. The illustrations are lovely, and the fact that there is something going on all over every page really helps keep little people amused. I've learned that primarily white pages are not to her taste and won't hold her interest for longer than it takes to find a cat, dog, or other animal, making this absolutely perfect. It joins I'm me and Norman in the category 'books which can be read to Daughter in a single sitting'. So, score on that front.

The construction is sturdy and small fingers find it easy to turn the pages and discover  the various textured inserts. Daughter has had this available to her for nearly a month now and hasn't managed to 'improve' it as he has with my classic copies of Spot and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Bookstart

Over the past few days, Daughter and I have been enjoying the Bookstart website. 

We were given our first Bookstart pack when we went to Daughter's one year check up with the health visitors and aside from including two books - Elmer's Weather by David McKee and Peepo Baby! by Georgie Birkett - the pack came with some leaflets about various games on the Bookstart website as well as a £1 book voucher. Score.

We've not yet had chance to go to a big bookshop to spend her voucher, but we have been spending a lot of time online, singing along with the rhymes on the website and playing the various games available.

I am prepared to be slated for introducing my baby to the internet at such a young age, but I passionately believe that - supervised - the web is an incredible teaching tool. Sites like Bookstart and Cbeebies are magical ways to engage tiny people for longer than two minutes, help them begin interacting with computers - something which will be increasingly important as they start school - and are a great tool for teaching things like counting, hand-eye-coordination and the alphabet. The Cbeebies podcasts are especially good, providing 'interactive' stories for children to join in with. The good thing with the computer over the television is that it encourages participation, rather than simple absorbtion and I'm sure other people who were taught the old-school (pun intended) way where you were forced to learn by rote will agree that learning by doing is much more fun.

I'm not suggesting that the Bookstart site is a wonderful babysitter - it only really works if you're there with your child anyway - nor is it a replacement for a bedtime story, however it is a brilliant supplement to reading at home and can help to give Mums and Dads a good idea of the sort of things to highlight when reading, and the sort of questions to ask when the book is finished.

That's Not My...

Usbourne's That's Not My... series has been around for a good few years now, and though some of the titles are getting rather obscure (That's Not My Frog, for one!), they're still incredibly interesting for little people.

Excellent for learning about adjectives associated with touch, these feely books are bright enough to hold the attention of the incredibly young without feeling gimmicky. It's a personal thing, but I'm not a huge fan of books with flashing lights and sound effects - in my experience, people use them to cover poor writing.

Daughter likes these books because they're short and colourful - they don't require her fleeting attention for longer than a few minutes. I like them because whilst it's easy to show red in a book, or write the noises that animals make, touch has to be experienced before you can describe it. I know there are lots of feely books on the market, but as stated above, the range of these is simply so wide that you can cover just about every topic a child could come up with. The familiar layout across the topics is nice too - there's a neatness to it. 

Making clothes last longer

Having been inspired by the amazing work of Disney over at Ruffles and Stuff, I decided to have a go at making Daughter's clothes last longer. Because this is a crafty sort of post, I originally put it on my other blog, however, it's a baby thing too so have decided to repost here.

I love the fabric of this little suit - it really appeals to the day-dreamy side of me, all castles turning into hats and cloud elephants and such.

To keep it wearable I needed to increase the length, and did so - weirdly - by cutting bits off.I trimmed away the bottom fastenings and the sleeves to create...

...this. Because the fabric is a stretch jersey, I could have just left this as it is and the little t-shirt wouldn't have frayed, but as I had some  lace, I decided to add this to the edges to neaten things up...

Hooray!

So there you go. If you like this tutorial, then please let me know.I've got other ideas for stretching out the wear of baby clothes, and I'd love to share them if you're interested.

Do you have any suggestions for how to make clothes last?

Baby baking ideas

Daughter has been getting up at 5am for the last few weeks - something I'm keen to put an end to, if only so I don't have to read Norman the Slug with the Silly Shell seven hundred times before breakfast.

Keeping a little person occupied throughout such a long day has been something of a struggle. Naturally, we have a few trips to the library, play at watering the flowers, and on Thursdays, Daughter goes to creche while I visit the PND group run by Suffolk MIND.

The other day though, I ran out of things to occupy her with and the little toot was getting fractious in the heat. Cue the baking.

Trying to build on her new skill of putting pasta into the saucepan from the jar (without eating it in transit), I melted some dark chocolate and got her to add some cereal we had lying around (Aldi's 'Benefit' flakes). As she stirred, I threw in some powdered coconut, some raisins and some honey to sweeten.

We scooped the mixture into some silicon moulds and then sprinkled some edible glitter on top. They looked gorgeous and tasted really good too.

I would recommend using rice crispies rather than flakes as Daughter found them hard to bite, despite her spectacular front teeth. Which she's learned to grind and make horrific noises with...

Just thought I'd share a rainy (or sunny!) day activity that even the tiniest of people can take part in :)

 

The Odd Egg

The Odd Egg by Emily Gravett is a definite favourite with Daughter, Husband and I. It tells the story of a group of birds waiting for their eggs to hatch, and duck - who doesn't have an egg of his own.

Personally, I love the quirky illustrations. Daughter finds it incredibly good fun to turn the half-pages which have been cut away to reveal the different eggs hatching. This is a really clever, visual way to show time passing and little fingers find it very easy to turn the board pages. The only criticism I have with it is that she finds them too fun and will keep returning to this page again and again, making it impossible to reach the (incredibly funny) climax of the tale.

This is a great buy for younger children in terms of story alone, but for people looking to open a dialogue on adoption this might be a really simple way to introduce the concept. It can also be used to start explaining an 'unconventional' family model - duck is a boy after all and still has a baby. That the egg is not his doesn't alter his love for it.

This is possibly my favourite book so far.

The Highway Rat

Not as famous as its spiritual predecessor The Gruffalo, Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler's take on Alfred Noyes' poem The Highwayman is a wonderful offering which teaches both consequence and humility without a preachy tone.

The Highway Rat follows the story of the title character as he robs the other woodland creatures of their foods.Written in the same style as Noyes' original verse, there are lines of repetition which some other reviewers (on amazon, if you're interested) found irritating and difficult to read. In our house though, these are the highlight. Daughter doesn't speak yet and so is perhaps too young to find repetitive things annoying, but the familiarity of the repeated line makes her little face light up and sometimes, with the second or third reading of, "the highway," she'll try and copy the syllables. It's very heartening. 

Having loved the original Highwayman poem, this was a real treat for me to read and made me revisit the Loreena McKennit track of the same name - another really fond memory from growing up. I hope that as Daughter gets older, I can use this as a way to introduce Noyes to her and other poets such as R. L. Stevenson and Poe. I am really keen for her to know that poetry isn't something to just be dissected at school until it is a lifeless thing.

I can see why people have voted this down - if repetition and verse aren't your thing then you're not going to get on with it, no matter how beautiful the illustrations are. And if you're not passionate, then you're not going be able to stir up that sort of enthusiasm in those you're reading to. For us though, this is a definite book-shelf highlight.

Norman, The Slug with the Silly Shell

I spent so long yesterday reading Norman the Slug with a Silly Shell that I didn't get chance to review it. Written by Sue Hendra of Barry the Fish with Fingers fame, Norman is a wonderfully silly book about how you can be anything you want to be with a little ingenuity.

 

Norman the slug idolises the snails and their wonderful shells. He longs to join in with their games, but can't because his squishy body is unstackable. Norman takes it on himself to fashion his own shell from an old donut.Having done so, he inadvertently saves the lives of his new friends.

Daughter adored this book. After having read it to her three times, she snatched it off me and made Husband read it to her too. After her nap, it was the first thing she went for, stroking Norman on all the pages, finally kissing the cover.To begin with, keeping her attention on anything other than the shiny front page was difficult but after a single read through she was hooked.

The 'moral' of this story is somewhat ambiguous. I took it to be an overwhelmingly positive one -  Norman wanted a shell and used his imagination to create one - the old Back to the Future mantra of, "If you put  your mind to it, you can accomplish anything". There are those, however, who will inevitably say that it's a book about needing to conform in order to have friends. Until Norman gets a shell, no one is interested in being his friend but once he matches the rest of his peers, he is accepted. I suppose how you take it depends on your world view.

In any case, Norman the Slug with a Silly Shell was very well received in our home. Now, if you'll excuse me, guess what I have to read. Again.

Baby book reviews

Every morning when we get up, Daughter empties her toy box and ignores everything she's taken out. Dutifully, she then crawls over to her book basket and begins the day's play in earnest, carefully selecting books and presenting them to me in turn.When it's time for her to play by herself, she'll close the book, take it off me and sit by herself, happily turning pages.

That being the way of things, I thought I'd review the books that we've been reading in the hopes that you can find something exciting and new. If there are any books you would like to see reviewed, please drop me a line and I'll see if I can get hold of it.

I thought we would start off with Egg by Alex T. Smith. .

This book follow the story of Foxy Du Bois and the aptly named Egg. Written in a tongue-in-cheek tone that will amuse grown-ups as well as children, it is essentially the tale of Hansel and Gretel retold. Egg arrives at Foxy's house - "Of all the suspicious looking houses, in all the deserted woods, in all the world, he had to roll up to hers..." - where she sets about trying to fatten him up so that she can eat him. Of course, there's a 'twist' at the end of the tale in which the plucky Egg comes out on top. All in all, a very nice modernisation of a classic story.

Daughter seemed to like this book too, stroking the pictures of Foxy on each page. The colourful, collage style of illustrations managed to hold her attention for over half of the book which, when reading to a 12 month old,  is a fair achievement. Not quite as successful as Eric Hill's Spot or the Meg and Mog stories in that respect, I think this book is aimed at an older audience. That said, Daughter kept fetching the book for me to look through with her again and again so it must work for her on some level.

Overall, I would say that this is an excellent buy for children over 12 months old. I imagine it to be a great way to open dialogue about where eggs come from, animals eating other animals and breakfast.

Join us again soon for  Norman the Slug with a Silly Shell. :)

Baby breakfast ideas

I don't know about you, but breakfast was never really my thing. I only started eating it at university because the campus cafe did a cooked one really cheaply (marketed correctly as the ideal hangover cure). In my food-snob days which followed shortly after - and which, frankly, never really vanished - I switched to porridge because it's filling, nutritious and cheap.

After a week or so of giving Daughter that foul baby rice gloop which can be easily confused for white emulsion, I switched her over to my prefered breakfast but thought that after three months or so of having oats, she must be pretty sick of the stuff. Variety, after all, is the spice of life.

The first meal of the day though, is a deceptively complicated affair. I wouldn't want to eat curry, or lasagne, or anything else of a particularly heavy nature, which leaves choices reasonably limited. With honey and uncooked cows milk still out of the question - roll on 1st birthday! - choices were further diminished. After a bit of thought though, I found the following things which Daughter loves:


Fruit yogurt, compote and oats - a nice vanilla yogurt, a sprinkling of oats and some stewed fruit makes a really nice start to the day. Yogurt, oats and banana is also really tasty and requires a little less forethought. Normally I stew fruit in the oven at the same time as I'm baking Daughter's other foods, but since batch cooking isn't for everyone, you can get some nice fruit mush from Ella's Kitchen and Plum.

Banana bread - this has become something of a staple in our house. It freezes well, uses up any leftover bananas and doesn't need any unusual ingredients that you're not likely to have in the cupboard. I make 2-3 loaves at a time so I don't need to worry about it later but it's quick enough to do from scratch. I used the Sainsbury's Little Ones recipe for it but it doesn't look to be online. This one is nearly identical though and is well worth a try.

Tea Loaf - I forget where I stumbled on this recipe but it has no added fat, is wonderfully moist and costs next to nothing to bake. The raisins give most of the sweetness so if you're worried about adding sugar, this is possibly the way to go, rather than the banana bread. I forget where I got my recipe base, but this is how it stands at the moment:

1 tea bag
around 250ml boiling water
ground white pepper
ground ginger
ground cinammon
ground nutmeg
250g raisins
125g sugar (brown is good but white works too
225g self raising flour
1 egg
spash of milk


Make a cup of strong, black tea and soak the raisins in it for at least 4 hours. I've left them for a week in the fridge before as they only get better with time. Mix the rest of the ingredients into the raisins adding the spices to taste and bake in a loaf tin on a low heat until cooked through. Slice and serve. If you're worried about it being too spicy, leave out the white pepper.

Fruit loaf - I've just been toasting Daughter a few slices of the supermarket's own brand fruit loaf for breakfast the past few days and she loves it. Her favourite sort - expensive tastes! - is the Marks and Spencer apple and raisin kind.

Toasted goodies - of course, there's always scotch pancakes, crumpets, toast and jam. Any toastable treat goes down well.

Post Natal Depression

Ah yes, Christmas. A period of sustained inactivity in which I hand all the responsibilities I can over to Mum and take up some epic fantasy game or another. I tend to play until it's late enough that I actually believe I'm riding around on horseback, swinging an enormous sword.
When I was little, I would walk home from my Primary School through a park. Alongside the path that I would take were two boulders. I don't know why they were there - I presume that when the park was levelled, someone found them and set them to one side, intending to move them and then never getting round to it. I doubt they were there for aesthetic reasons in any case.
I would stand on the flatter of the two rocks, flicking my hair in an attempt to make it blow in the wind. I'm not sure where I learned about romantic-wind-swept hair from, being as how I was only about six years old, but there you have it. Somehow the whole illusion hinged on the impossible task of getting my mullet-like 'do' to flutter majestically. Pirates of Dark Water or Prince Valiant is probably to blame. Anyway, on that rock I would pretend to be a great warrior looking out across a stormy sea with an army behind me. Again, I can only imagine that late 80s/early 90s cartoons are responsible*.
Even back then, my imagination had an enormous sword and an inflated sense of responsibility. I remember feeling overwhelmed and frightened, yet strangely resolute as I thought of my current - always fleeting - invented task at hand.
I have Post Natal Depression. It's not something I'd planned to write about but I feel that I've made my current state conspicuous by my absence. And in said current state, I feel that same mixture of horror and resolution that I would subject myself and my imaginary sword to whilst on that rock, all those years ago.
I think my current penchant for fantasy games stems from that - this would, after all, be a damn sight easier if I had a sword in hand, rather than a packet of innocuously named Citalopram and a PS3 controller. I told my (amazing) friends about my condition and asked that we didn't bring it up. They all offered a shoulder regardless and left the ball in my court. I guess this is my cowardly way of not only saying "thanks" but offering something more of an insight into why I might not be acting like myself.
Any eloquence I might once have had has left me, but as always, the internet has provided a voice in the form of Hyperbole and a Half. I laughed and cried in equal measures when I read this because it sums the whole ludicrous situation up perfectly. I'm yet to have an "I'll rent a horror movie" epiphany, but I have taken to defying road signs - venturing down all lanes with "Road Closed" markers in a small effort to rebel. It's a form of self destruction. Since I can't drink I have to do something.
_________
*I didn't get on with most girls - they wanted to play "Mummies and Daddies" whilst I wanted to play "Mummies", referring to the ancient Egyptian variety. When we did manage to settle on a Disney film to re-enact, I would inevitably volunteer to be the villain, because they were at least interesting and I wouldn't have to fight with the others over who got to be Princess-Whatever.

Joy

The last few days with Daughter have been a real joy. My siblings were here and as a result, my little girl has enjoyed being the centre of attention. We've had so, so much fun.

Daughter has been experimenting with happy noises - much to our delight - and getting much better at going to bed. I've found that the less I think about parenting and the more time I spend pulling silly faces, the easier life is.

So that's my goal - forget all about milestones, all about books, sleeping regularly, getting 'enough' sleep etc. As my wise mother told me, if Daughter is tired she'll sleep, regardless of where she is.

It is really hard to stop thinking about what she should be doing by which age when you're bombarded with messages telling you which formula your child should have at which age, which weaning foods are suitable etc. But today, Daughter stole toasted tea cake from my plate in a cafe and munched it without batting an eyelid. She picked up the food, put it in her mouth, chewed and swallowed. We promptly bought her some rusks after that, despite their 7+ month age-tag.

Even if I don't get enough sleep at night, I'm just going to zonk out during the day, even if it means I won't get everything done.

I know I swore I'd rip up the books before, but the 'information' about how you should raise your child is so structured into every aspect of our society that it's impossible to block out completely. I'll do my best to take it all with a pinch of salt from now on, now that I've seen how fun things are when you don't worry.

Jabs

At eleven o'clock today, Daughter will be going for her second round of jabs. She should have had these months ago, but due to the house move and an upset tummy, I postponed it until now.

I was wracked with terrible guilt after her first course of injections. Just before the needle went in, my little girl looked up at me and offered the biggest smile she'd ever given. Then there was a look of horror and then the screaming started. I felt as though I'd betrayed that big cheesy grin.

I know she won't remember this - I don't remember my immunisations, after all. I still feel pretty mean though, getting her up from a nice long nap, offering a bottle and a snuggle and then presenting her for needle jabbing...

Urgh. Listen to me. I meant for this blog to be a place where I could talk about all the wonderful things that Daughter does, without boring my friends to bits and its become a dumping ground for every bitch and moan I ever had. I will endeavour to be more positive in future.

Over and out.

Avent

I really like my Avent bottles. Not only are they British made, but Daughter seemed to take really well to them. Except that the adapters on the Avent Classics warp in the microwave steriliser.

Trying to calm a hungry baby, and stop a bottle from leaking is not fun. Especially when you haven't been organised enough to keep a kettle full of tepid water (something I'm generally good at on account of my ten-a-day tea habit) and need to boil some fresh. You end up shaking the bottle to mix the formula and spray scalding hot milk all over yourself. Great.

So, after having just forked out for new Avent Classic bottles, I am going to have to fork out some more for the Avent Advanced.

Why not just take this opportunity to switch to the glass bottles I've spoken about before? Because doing so would result in me having to throw out all of the teats I've got an effectively start again. I wanted the glass so that I could be a little eco-friendly (and save myself some pennies instead of having to replace bottles all the time) and chucking out all the related paraphernalia to buy more doesn't accomplish this. Urgh.

I am so p*ssed off  at having had D-MER.I feel that between it, the house move and various other things, I have missed out on my daughter's early, snuggly days. All I can do now is race to catch up with her as she learns to do all kinds of exciting things and leaves me standing, longing for the cuddly feeds that I used to resent because I'd no idea  what was up with me.

New Born

We were out at the supermarket today and saw a couple with a crying new-born. The poor little thing was beside herself and it took me back.

Though Daughter does still 'go off on one' every so often, consciousness is no longer marked by an ear-splitting howl. It's amazing how, in less than five months, my child has changed so completely. People told me not to wish my time with her away, but I'm glad she's now so interested in her surroundings and is far more responsive.

I don't want to speak too soon after having put Daughter to bed, but things do seem to have become a bit easier. Slowly, by degrees, we are making some headway with sleeping. After doing the Johnson's Baby Sleep Challenge - which, I have to confess, has made me buy their night time bath - bedtime has become far, far less taxing. I still have to get up to (breast)feed twice during the night, but the timing of the last bottle of the day means that I can have a glass of wine, or a visit from Mr. Daniels with some ginger ale, every once in a while. And sometimes, after a day of screaming, a little tipple takes the edge off one's frayed nerves.

Christening

We are having Daughter christened. This is something that sits rather uncomfortably with me - not because I am against the idea, but because of the ramifications.

I don't know if I can be eloquent enough to explain my reservations but I will try.

I grew up in the church and used to love going to Sunday School - our church was a simple, white box sort of affair. It felt very homely and humble and honest. But a visit to the Vatican ruined church - and if I'm honest, Christianity - for me. It made me upset and angry that we had spent immeasurable money to build palaces for God's priests while people starved. I still believe in a loving deity, but I don't think said deity would approve of the sheer ... well, I don't know how to describe the Vatican. Ostentatious? Gold and black marble. The word Austere obviously wasn't in the artist's vocabulary. Don't get me wrong, it's glorious. But as far as deadly sins go, Greed springs to mind.

In any case. I think that we, as a species, are not able to comprehend what God is and what God wants. I know I said that I don't think They* would like us to spend money building palaces, but that's just my opinion.If they're omnipotent, how can we begin to imagine that we understand how they think/function?

But I digress. I worry about keeping the promises the Christening services involves. I know I can teach Daughter to love and be kind, but as I recall, you promise to bring the child up within the church, and I'm not sure I believe the church is the community I want to raise my child in. And I know thousands of people have their children Christened without intending to keep the promises they make on the day, but whether I believe in the ideology or not, people have still died for said ideology**. If I go into the service intending to brush aside the gravity of the oath I take, I make a mockery of everything those people died for.

But perhaps I'm over thinking this. Perhaps I can justify the ceremony by thinking of my own idea of God throughout. This throws up problems of its own though - how is my idea of God any better than that of the Christian faith?


This is exactly why I don't read philosophy. You start thinking about something trying to andwer a question, and end up with more questions.

So I make this promise here, because it will offend no one - I worry that I would offend my husband and friends were I to promise this on the day. I swear I will bring my daughter up to love, to believe and to question. I hope she will be able to form her own opinions in a sensible, reasonable way.

*I use 'They' in place of He/She.
**I'm referring to people having been killed for their beliefs, not to the farce that was the Crusades.

Nursery

I've always clamoured that I would never put my child into nursery. "What's the point in having kids if you're just going to pay other people to raise them," I have been known to say.

Only, I met Toddler's mum in the village today and went into Toddler's nursery with them. And Daughter just came to life as we walked through the door. They were singing and playing and she was laughing and straining to get out of her sling to get a better look.

I asked for some information about it all and whilst it does look like a great place for her to go - they grow food, cook it with the older kids, have a swimming pool, Spanish lessons and all kinds of musical fun - I still don't know if I'll be able to bring myself to take her there.

In my line of work, I don't earn a lot of money, so I would be working at a loss if I were to send her there full time. Part time might be viable though...

I just don't know. It would be good for her to socialise and for me to get away for a little while. Even if it's just to clean the house.

Heart vs head vs wallet. It's a 3 way battle - who will be victorious?

Avenue

I often forget about car boot sales. Ebay being as it is, you can get items shipped to your door for a fraction of the price that you'd pay in the shop and you can go hunting for them any time - day or night.

Only a car boot sale is better. You can pick up five glorious hardback books for less and a pound and not have to pay postage costs.

I stumbled upon 'The Year at Maple Hill Farm' for 20p and am so enamoured with the pictures that I'm going to get another copy, cut the best ones out and frame them to decorate my rather untidy nursery.

 

I also found The old car by Elisabeth Borchers (which amazon can not provide me with a picture of), and Bringing Down the Moon by Jonathan Emmett.

 

 

But bargain books aside. I'd forgotton about boot-sales as a way to save money. In recent years they've become nothing more than away to rid my home of clutter. As an avenue for making my dwindling maternity payments stretch further, I will be keeping an eye out for more sales!

Bargain!

So I bought a Maclaren Triumph pushchair from ebay the other day. For £25, it's proved to be the bargain of the decade!

I've been using a sling up until now, but Daughter is getting too heavy for long walks, especially if you need to have the nappy bag with you. Neat as mine it, it's still the size of what I'd call a weekend-away bag so lugging that around as well as the increasingly heavy baby is hard work.

We tested out the pram by having a walk around our local country park and Daughter loved it. Lots to look at, lots of fresh air and finally, after being on her back in our other pram, the chance to sit up whilst out and about. Nosy little girl loved every second of it.

I never imagined her sitting up. When we first took her home from the hospital, I never once imagined that the tiny little lady in my arms could be big enough to be struggling against her harness to sit forward.Just goes to show.

I still can't picture a complete night's sleep. The 29th of April was the last one I had, and as far as I can tell, will be the last one I ever have. Right now though, if I can't have quantity, I'm going for quality. Some yoga, some nice sleepy making tea and clean, line dried sheets should make for a deep, if short, snooze.

Speaking of which, I'm not wasting another minute of her being in bed. Night y'all!