Dear Henry (February 2014)

My little pigwidgeon,

Another month has passed us by. I love being off work with you. I love that our days pass us by in a happy blur and I get to spend every minute of the day with you. We are in our own little bubble really, Mummy often forgets that 'real life' is happening outside of our house. Our days consist of feeds, nappy changes and playing. You got a new walker this month and you love being in it. You still love your door bouncer too, anything that lets you be on your feet. We see your baby friends during the week too, it's lovely to see you all growing up together.

You went on your first little holiday this month to Norfolk. We went for a week and Marmar and Parpar came with us for 4 days. You were such a good boy the whole time, we loved having you with us. The only times that were stressful were the journeys both ways! On the way there you cried for about 3 and a half hours! We don't know what was wrong with you, I think you were bored and wanted to be out of your seat but who knows. Poor Daddy was really stressed in the front and I was in the back trying desperately to make you happier. Then on the way home Daddy was poorly and couldn't stop being sick so we had to drop him at a hotel in Newark and I had to get you and George home safely on my own. What a disaster! You were an angel in the car though, well done little one.

You've finally started drinking milk from a cup so Mummy was able to leave you with Marmar for a few hours while I got my hair done. I really missed you and I raced home to you as soon as I was finished. What a silly mummy. You were fine though, you are a really good baby, we are so lucky. 

You are rolling around a lot more now and you are getting much stronger when you're sitting up...you're so close to being able to do it all by yourself with no one holding you. 

You're still sleeping badly at night but you have 3 good naps during the day so that's good. Mummy has got used to having no sleep and I do love our snuggles in the night too. Sometimes I lie awake and just watch you, even though I'm really tired and should be asleep.

A couple of days ago you had your first ever food. We started you off with carrot purée and you weren't really sure what to make of it. You had a few mouthfuls though so that's a start. You much preferred parsnip which you tried the next day, you even cried when there was none left! You are such a big boy sitting in your highchair, you sit in it every evening while Mummy and Daddy eat their tea. I can't believe how quickly you're growing up sweetheart...I wish time would slow down a little.

I love you so much beautiful boy. Every night before you go to sleep I tell you that I love you to the moon and back again, to infinity and beyond, and forever and ever.

 

Lots of love,

Mummy xxx

A very special day...Henry's first ever food!

So here we are at 23 weeks and my little one has made it very clear that he is ready for his first solids. He now watches everything, and I mean everything, that we put into our mouths! I now understand what people mean when they say that they just know when their baby is ready. Only fruit and veg are recommended before 6 months as babies can't process gluten before this so for the next 3 weeks we are going to make our way through every fruit and vegetable that we can to get Henry used to different flavours and textures. I don't think I've ever been so excited about fruit and veg! Our fruit and veg box arrived on Monday so we were all set. 

Daddy obviously wanted to be home for the big occasion so we chose today because he was home a little earlier than usual from work.

I steamed a carrot first and then mashed it in my mini masher (by Annabel Karmel/NUK). I mixed in a little expressed milk and we were good to go. I froze the leftover carrot in an ice cube tray so we will just use these up in the next few days and weeks.

Henry wasn't really sure what to make of it all. He pulled a few funny faces, probably ate a couple of spoonfuls and was done, but it was a start! He was much happier holding the spoon himself which we let him do, with a bit of guidance from Mummy! Not sure I fancy carrot purée up our cream walls just yet.

And it all starts again tomorrow with parsnip purée...

Good babies sleep?

"Is he sleeping through yet?"

The question that I dread people asking but the one that everyone seems obsessed with. A baby that sleeps through in their own room, in their own bed, is the holy grail of babies. It is what 'good' babies do after all isn't it?

Henry doesn't sleep through the night, he never has. I've never given him formula to get him to sleep through as has been suggested by many (even the day he was born, by a midwife). I've never done controlled crying to get him to sleep, again as suggested by many. I'm absolutely sure it'd work, but it feels so wrong to me to leave my baby to cry himself to sleep. I've tried putting him to bed at different times, a warm room, a cold room, feeding him more during the day, feeding him on a strict schedule during the day. He just doesn't sleep through. Does that make him a 'bad' baby?

In the western world we seem obsessed with making our babies independent. The day that I realised that my little boy was dependant on me and would be for a relatively short amount of time, was the day that I was ok with him not sleeping through. Babies aren't made to sleep through the night. Of course some do, but it's not the norm and I've realised that since having Henry. Before I had him I really assumed that all babies would sleep through and the parents must be doing something wrong if the baby wasn't.

Most of the time he wakes up hungry. Breast milk is processed much quicker than formula and generally breastfed babies will take longer to sleep through and require more feeds than formula fed babies. I'm sure I will give Henry some formula in the next few months as we gradually wean him, but I'm not going to do it just to get a few more hours of sleep. 

He sometimes wakes up and is simply unsettled. He needs a cuddle and rocking back to sleep. I don't know why he woke up, maybe it was his teeth hurting again or his little muscles aching after he'd used them for the first time to hold himself up or roll over. Maybe he was scared or needed reassuring that I was there and that everything was ok. Why has it become to wrong to comfort him when he wakes up in the night? Leaving him to cry it out would go against every instinct in my body. I am his mummy, I am the only person he needs in the night. Yet people are so quick to tell you they're getting 'spoilt' or that you need to let them cry it out until they fall back to sleep. This will make them a 'good' baby, an independent sleeper.

Have you ever seen a mummy pig surrounded by sleeping piglets? They sleep on her, touching her and one another, they don't choose to sleep on their own. Babies sleep better in their mummies arms or at least close to them. Most of them need that, they are no different to other mammals. We won't take puppies or kittens away from their mother too soon when we buy them as a pet, yet we want our babies sleeping in their Moses baskets, preferably in their own rooms, from day one. I find that so odd. Henry will settle so much quicker next to me, so on the nights that he's unsettled or poorly I take him next door to the spare room and sleep in there with him, whatever time it is, we all get a better night's sleep that way. I'm not saying cosleeping with your baby will work for everyone but what I'm saying is, it's actually more 'normal' than a baby who goes down awake, in their own room and can settle themselves for 12 hours without a peep. It's not abnormal for a baby mammal to need to be with their mummy to settle down to sleep.

I read a good article which talked about sleeping arrangements across the world and throughout history. It's really worth a read if you're struggling with a baby that won't sleep alone or sleep through.

Click here for the article 

The sooner I accepted that it wasn't the norm for a newborn to sleep through, the more I accepted the sleepless nights. Of course there are exceptions and some babies are just good sleepers. Just like adults, some babies need more sleep than others. My brother has 3 children and all 3 of them sleep differently, despite having been brought up exactly the same way. As I said, I'm ok with the fact that we aren't getting much sleep. We will get there eventually and I know that at this moment, I have a little boy that needs me in the night just as much as he does during the day and that's ok, it's the way it's meant to be.

So next time you see me please ask how he's feeding, how I'm feeling, how weaning is going, when I'm back to work, what he enjoys...just please don't ask how he's sleeping!! (This doesn't count for my mummy friends, you know who you are. There's nothing I love better than a good old discussion about our terrible night's sleep the night before. It keeps me sane knowing I'm not the only one!!)

Foodie Monday

I wanted to start the week off healthily so made this for breakfast

Organic Greek yogurt with cherry compote and handmade organic granola.  It was SO good, will definitely be having it more often. Loving my granola from the farmers' market too, may have to go back in a couple of weeks for some more. It definitely beats my usual breakfast of jam on toast or a banana on the go! I had it with a chai latte and a glass of apple juice.

We then had our first organic fruit and veg box delivered from a local farm. We are going to start weaning Henry this week and wanted to make sure we always have a range of fruit and veg in the house as Mr B and I tend to always pick up the same old things in the supermarket.

The veg box contains old potatoes, baking potatoes, new potatoes, onions, carrots, parsnips, sprouts, leeks, broccoli, cauliflower, swede and green beans. The fruit contains raspberries, green and red grapes, bananas, pears, red and green apples and satsumas. Tasty! Can't wait to get cooking, pureeing and mashing for Henry.

For dinner we decided to use up some of the veg so we had roast lamb. We didn't have a roast yesterday because Mr B made a paella instead so a Monday roast dinner it was. We had leg of lamb, roast potatoes, sweet potato and swede mash, cabbage and sprouts with onion gravy. I love being off work and having time to do lovely dinners like this during the week. I meant to take a photo but we had finished by the time I remembered! Will be doing bubble and squeak with the leftovers tomorrow.

Mummy spa day

So back when we were pregnant and very naive we came up with the idea that we'd leave the babies with their dads for the whole day and treat ourselves to a spa day. We decided on February, we thought by then we'd easily be able to leave our 5/6 month old babies all day. 

Turns out we were wrong! There was no way we could go to the spa for the whole day so we compromised and had a spa day at home! We went to my friend's house and ate lots of cake, drank fizzy grape juice and had treatments done by 2 therapists who came to the house. It may not have been the spa and it may not have been champagne, but it was a real treat. I had my eyebrows waxed, a manicure and a pedicure. Here are my before and afters...

The babies were really good, it was lovely seeing all the boys together again and scary to see how much they've all grown. It's lovely to have other mummy friends with babies the same age, I'd definitely recommend an NCT course to meet other couples due around the same time, particularly if it's your first baby.

Family Saturday

I love family Saturdays. Mr B is duty manager but we decided to venture out anyway and hope that no one called him!

We went to Hexham for a wander, it's only about 25 minutes from us but we never go. There was a farmers' market on so we bought a few treats from the stalls. Yum.

Henry was such a good boy, we used the pushchair part of the travel system rather than the carrycot. He loved it! He could see out and where he usually falls asleep or screams, today we didn't hear a peep and he was wide awake the whole time. We stopped for lunch and he had a feed then fell asleep on the walk back to the car. 

We were parked in Waitrose which is my favourite food shop ever so we popped in for a couple of bits and ended up spending a fortune! Why does that always happen?

Here are a few treats we picked up. A Hazelnut Lindt bunny, some posh Heston hot cross buns and 2 yumdoughs (mix between a doughnut and a yum yum). So tasty!!

We then popped into a pub near us and had a drink on the way home. Hen even sat in a highchair which was nice, we had 2 free hands for once!

Tonight Parpar is coming over for Henry snuggles, a take away and the football. A very happy Saturday all round :-)

Judgemental mummies...

In my drafts section of my blog are 3 posts. I haven't published any of them because I can't get them right, they all sound like serious rants and that wasn't how they were meant to across. 

The thing that they're ranting about is pretty much the same thing. Judgemental mothers. Mummies that feel superior because they feed a certain way or dress their children a certain way or live their lives a certain way. I think Internet groups, Facebook and Twitter are perfect breeding grounds for these mummies. It's very easy to come across as a saintly, perfect mummy in front of a computer screen. No one can see you when you've had no sleep and you've spent the day in tears. No one can hear you when you snap at your children after they've rubbed your bronzing pearls into the carpet again! It's easy to be rude to others and make them feel bad about how they've chosen to bring up their children with a computer as a shield. I'm sure these women say things on a  keyboard that they'd never say out loud. It's the mummy, middle-class version of a Twitter Troll and I hate it.

Being a new mummy is magical, it's the best thing I've ever done. But it's not easy. I'm certainly not perfect, but I do my best. As women and as mummies, I don't understand why we wouldn't support each other, no matter what. Someone might do something that you personally wouldn't, but since when did it become acceptable to tell that mummy what she is doing is wrong?!

If you choose to go back to work full time, brilliant. I admire your organisation in simply getting out of the house in one piece! If you want to be a stay at home mum, that's great too. It's definitely not the easy option that some people would believe.

If you breastfeed for 2 years, well done you, it's not easy. But if you chose formula from day one, you're doing a great job too. I'm not sure why some people feel the need to make mothers feel like they're poisoning their babies by giving them anything other than breast milk. It's just not true and totally unhelpful. Equally, if I want to breastfeed in a public place, don't moan about it or give me dirty looks, it's a perfectly natural thing to do. My baby is hungry and I am feeding him, leave me alone.

If you wean at 4 months with baby rice, great. If you chose to wait till 7 months to do a baby led approach, fantastic. Calling baby rice 'filth' on Facebook isn't helpful...why do it, even if that's your opinion? All babies are different, so are us mummies. One method might suit one person but not another and that's ok. If someone asks for advice on weaning their 5 week old baby, there's a way of giving helpful advice, a way to point her in the direction of NHS advice. Calling her a stupid ignorant cow isn't the way to help anybody.

If you take your baby to swimming lessons because you want them to get used to the water or because you want to teach them about water safety or because you just want to have fun, that's really great. Be aware, however, that not everyone can afford £15 a lesson or they may see that as a lot of money for a baby's swimming lesson. It is no excuse for you to 'inform' other mothers that their baby won't ever learn to swim well or will have no awareness of water safety. After all, a whole generation of us managed just fine.

If you choose to co-sleep with your baby every night, that's great. If you never let your children into your bed and that works for you, then that's brilliant. We let Henry in bed with us if he's unsettled but I appreciate that that isn't for everyone. The number of arguments I've read on co-sleeping is ridiculous. Just do what works for you and stop judging others that do something different. Simple.

The thing is, we all have opinions on what is best. The difference is, some of us choose to keep these opinions to ourselves. I hate dummies but I would never go up to someone in the street if their child had a dummy and tell them about why I hate them, nor would I do it online. I am not a better parent because I don't use a dummy, it's just a personal choice.

So I will now delete my 3 draft posts. I don't feel I need to rant as much now. Hopefully my next posts will be a bit more cheerful, here's a smiley face picture to start us off!

5 months today

So my little monster is 5 months old today. How did that happen? We love him so much.

Feeling 'anti-nostalgic'

I spend quite a lot of my adult life feeling nostalgic. We talk about things that we miss and how amazing our childhoods were. We talk about the sweets we used to be able to buy, the games we used to play and the songs we used to listen to. I've heard myself utter the words "back in the day...." several times recently and I feel distinctly old because of it.

However, there are certain things that I am glad stayed in the nineties. Things that make me glad that times have changed and we have moved on. Here are some of these things...

• The Internet.

Remember picking up the telephone when someone was using the crappy old dial up Internet in a different room? You'd practically be deafened by screeches that  sounded like 100 cats being brutally murdered. What the hell was that noise?! The Internet would take ages to connect, again with a completely bizarre noise (you're doing that noise in your head now, aren't you?!). Web pages were only in Times New Roman and routinely took 15 minutes to load. Not good.

• Hair accessories. 

Remember when fluorescent scrunchies and crushed velvet scrunchies were all the rage? Hmm massive fashion error. Remember owning every colour of butterfly clip and clipping them in all over your hair when you were going out somewhere smart? Even more dodgy was the hair mascara we'd smear on in the hope of looking cool and fashionable. I mean, really? Hair mascara? Who thought of that?

3. Photos. Remember when you used to pay £8.99 for 24 prints in Boots and you had to wait a week to pick them up? Then when you got there you'd be so excited you wouldn't make it out of the shop before opening the envelope to have a look only to find that every picture was blurred because the flash hadn't worked? No clicking a button to remove red eyes or Instagram filters to improve your complexion. Just rubbish photos that cost a bloody fortune.

• Teletext

You know when you want to check the premier league table you can do it on your mobile in approximately 30 seconds? Or even better, ask Siri to find it for you. Well remember the days when you had to use teletext. First you had to find sport, then football, then league tables and then it'd come up with '2/15 Division One' at the top of the screen. You had 14 other leagues to get through before the Premier League was back on...there was no way of flicking through them, you just had to wait it out. Then when, after 8 long minutes you finally got there, if you didn't press the hold button quick enough, you had to wait another 8 long minutes to see it again. Yawn.

• Encyclopaedias. 

Yes, these boring books may have been good to find out the names of the past Kings of England or how many bones a diplodocus skeleton has, but they couldn't answer questions as quickly and as accurately as Google, let's be honest. Homework projects took forever, made especially difficult if you struggled with alphabetical order. What a waste of my time. Children of today don't know how easy they have it when they can just copy and paste a Wikipedia page for their homework. Jealous.

• Dodgy jewellery. 

Anklets, tattoo chokers and toe rings. I really don't have to say any more.

•Cassettes.

Remember when you wanted to rewind a tape you had to turn it over and fast forward the other side?! Seriously why not just add a rewind button? And then there was this...

Taping the Top 40 on a Sunday without getting the presenters voices in was a real skill. Thank the Lord for iTunes. 

• Some serious fashion disasters. Slouchy socks, fluorescent everything, shell suits, tracksuits, a lot of velvet. Just awful. Really, really awful. I owned one of these for goodness' sake. I thought I looked nice. 

• The first mobiles. 

Remember the pull out aerials? The scratch off panel you needed to top up your phone on pay as you go? The crashed phone lines on Christmas Day as everyone tried to top up at the same time and the crowded networks every New Year's Eve? Interchangeable covers that you'd happily spend £30 on because it was 'so clever' and such a novelty? SIM cards that only stored 10 messages, so my teenage life was spent debating over which 9 messages were most important to keep! I'll never moan about my 14GB storage on my iPhone again.

So you see, it wasn't all good. We need to be more thankful for Google, Siri and Apple. We moan that the youth of today are obsessed with technology and no longer socialise like we used to but I'll be honest, I'm just glad they've stopped wearing hair mascara and toe rings.

The cake diaries...

Today we went for tea and cake to my favourite cafe, Granny B's. We shared Malteser cake and key lime pie and they were both divine. They always have such a good selection of cakes and biscuits, I need to go more often to try them all out!

My big boy getting very good at sitting up!

The best of friends

How cute are these photos I took earlier of Henry and George?

One of the reasons I love Labradors so much is that they are brilliant with children and that was definitely a consideration for us when we got him 5 years ago. I honestly can't understand why people would have aggressive dogs and children in the same house? Just last week a baby was killed by a dog named 'Killer' - an illegal cross breed. Why would you even own one of those dogs? Let alone with a baby in the house. I really don't believe you can ever trust any dog 100% but I can honestly say that I trust all of the dogs in our family as much as I ever could do.

George hasn't really paid much attention to Henry and visa versa until the last month or so. Henry bats his hand around to stroke George and George is a lot more inquisitive about what Henry is doing now. Earlier I went upstairs to do some jobs and took Henry with me. I lay him down next to George and they both just looked at each other for a while. I kept watching them and slowly Henry got closer to George and kept stroking him and 'talking' to him. George kept getting really close to Henry but he knows not to lick him, he's been told enough times! It was so lovely, they were both so gentle.

I'm glad that Henry is starting to love his doggy friend.

Brownie in a mug

You know those nights where you really want something sweet but you only have tinned pears in the house and they just won't do?! Well this recipe is perfect for those nights. It may also mean you'll never be thin but to be fair, on those kind of nights you really don't care anyway 

Here's what you'll need:

• 1/4 cup flour

• 1/4 cup sugar 

• 2 tablespoons cocoa power

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

• a pinch of salt

• a pinch of cinnamon

• 2 drops of vanilla extract

• cream or ice cream to serve 

Mix all of the ingredients together in a mug, making sure there are no lumps.

Microwave on full power for 2 minutes and then serve with cream or ice cream.

So easy and so tasty!