Fourteen months old today

Today, exactly one day before I turn 42 (horrors!), The Little Madam turns 14 months old.

She isn't at all bothered by the prospect of getting older. She's too busy learning new ways of getting from a lying-down position to a sitting-up one. Her current favourite is to roll over onto her tummy, then push back with her arms unil she lands on her bum. She only practises this when 1) I'm trying to change her nappy, and 2) when I put her down for a sleep.

Right now, life with TLM feels mostly pretty easy - she still resists naps of course (she wouldn't be TLM if she didn't), but at night sleeps for around 11 hours. She smiles lots, is great at keeping herself entertained and is much less likely to cry when a well-meaning stranger tries to play with her.

Every day I try to take her out somewhere and show her something of the world. One day, the prospect of cruising the supermarket, visiting her Poh Poh or looking for books at the library will probably bore her to tantrums, but right now these are all exciting adventures.

At last I can honestly live the cliche say that it's great fun have a little 'un.

Yes, you CAN blame your tools.

The first time I made berry muffins, I managed to overcome the fact that my oven's thermostat has died and gone to oven heaven. They turned out perfectly and I was so excited I had to go visiting that very afternoon, just so I could show those muffins off.

The second time I made berry muffins was not quite so successful, and I blame the oven.

By the time I had semi-melted the margerine, unsuccessfully mixed it with the milk and egg-replacement, attempted to mix it all in a beaker with a stick blender, spilt it all over my clothes and the floor because I let go of it when I reached over to turn it off at the wall, put on a Wiggles DVD to prevent The Little Madam from engaging in an intimate investigation of this scrambled eggs-like plaything, changed into clean clothes and mopped the mess off the kitchen floor, the oven was probably hot enough to fire clay pots.

The muffins were still raw on the inside by the time they'd developed a brown, crispy surface. Although I fixed this by turning the oven off and leaving them in there for a further 15 minutes.

And yes, we still ate the muffins.

Here's the recipe - it's great if your oven doesn't outwit you:

Dairy-free, egg-free berry muffins
2 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
75g margarine, melted
½ cup sugar
1 cup rice milk
1 tsp Orgran egg replacement
1 tab water
1 cup frozen berries, chopped

Set the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.
Sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl.
Add the sugar.
In a separate bowl, mix the melted margarine, milk, Orgran and water.
Add to the dry ingredients.
Mix gently.
Divide among 12 muffin pans (or 6 Texas muffin pans).
Bake for 10-12 minutes.

At the risk of being flamed by breastfeeding mums everywhere...

I've just read another article about a fight between a retailer and a woman who tried to breastfeed on their premises. And despite the fact that I myself am a breastfeeding woman (though only just), my opinion on the matter probably doesn't match that of most others.

It's probably because I'm a teensy-weensy bit on the prudish side, because I was never comfortable with breastfeeding The Little Madam in public, myself. At our mum's group meetings, I never knew where to look when someone whipped out a boobie to give her little one his or her feed. TLM's feeds were usually timed so that I could get the job done before we left the house, or after we returned home (and I've just realised why I don't get out much).

Not that I'm against breastfeeding in public per se, rather that I'm keener on seeing more nice places where women can feed their babies when they aren't at home. If I've ever had to do the deed in an airport lounge or cafe, it's only because the only other options were to use the toilets or go home.

You could say that if I'm uncomfortable with it, then it's my problem. But then, it's obviously a problem with a significant number of people. And until the attitudes of enough people have adjusted, surely it's only being sensitive and thoughtful to try to avoid offend those who haven't yet reached that stage of enlightenment?

First words

The boy was the first to decide that when The Little Madam said "da da", she meant him. He was the one who told me that when she says "mumumumum", she means me and not the food in her mouth.

But yesterday I heard her say "shut" several times. At least I hope that's the word she's saying.

Same old same old...

I'm suffering from severe bloggers' block right now, so I'm just gonna list a few things below for the sake of having something to say:

The Little Madam is quite the roller these days. Every time we put her down for a nap, or attempt a tricky - i.e. pooey - nappy change, she's like a limbless Olympican going for a world record. This isn't the first time she's done any rolling, but it's the first time in a while. I'm sure it's a sign of some kind of developmental leap.

I'm having my second consecutive cold, and it looks like TLM is too. I keep wanting to wipe the snot from her upper lip, but the last thing I want is for her lip to get all red and raw from the over-eager application of wood pulp. Besides, don't kids like eating their own snot?

The boy is also sick. Which is not as bad as you'd think, because now that we have TLM he doesn't treat every cold as a near-death experience. It's actually nice to have his company when he'd normally be off computer-geeking for a living.

I used to be smug about having lost all my pregnancy weight within the first few months of TLM's birth, but since I've stopped most of her breastfeeds (now down to one per day, before her bedtime), all those extra cookie-and-cake calories have gone straight to my tummy. I've avoided it so far, but I think an cardio-exercise DVD for home workouts will soon be on my shopping list.

Still watching gilmore girls on DVD - the boy brought home seasons 3, 4 and 5 a week or so ago and I'm practically soaking in it most evenings.

Like sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives...

The fluffy menagerie

I took this photo while waiting for The Little Madam to nap this morning. After fifteen minutes she started yelling, so I went in to find her with one leg sticking out of the collar of her sleeping bag, and the other hanging out of one armhole. She could grow up to be a gymnast...

It might be a girl thing, but TLM has a real fondness for soft toys. And the boy is a sucker for buying her whatever makes her hyperventilate with excitement.

From left to right are:
Pelican, Red Panda and Heffalump, Dragon (originally mine), Tigg, Koala and 'Enry (that's Cockney for Henry).

Brainwashing

Thanks to the recent high-rotation in our house, of the Woody Guthrie's Songs to Grow On, I cannot get those songs out of my head. Particularly the one that goes "Put your finger in the air, in the air" (or is it "put your finger in yer ear, in yer ear"? When I lie in bed at night, if I don't fall asleep instantly my head becomes haunted by his cute ditties about going 'round and around in a circle, building a house for the baby-o and taking people for a ride in his car-car.

Our Baby Einstein DVDs get quite a bit of usage too - I put one on first thing in the morning to keep The Little Madam out of trouble while I shower, and another one at the end of the day so she'll not try to climb into the bath when I'm filling it with hot water.

But because we've played Baby Neptune so many times now, I can't hear Strauss's The Blue Danube without mentally inserting "Quack quack, quack quack" at appropriate points in the music (it accompanies a bathtub scene featuring syncronised-swimming rubber ducks - it's great).

Just as I was telling a couple of fellow parents I'd just met the other day, having a child sure has opened up a whole new world to me.

Technical difficulties

Ever since the boy moved in with me, I've had to live with his need for constant upgrades to our various electronic appliances. I'm sure it's a boy thing as well as a geek thing - if I were still single I'd still be using the same VCR I bought about 8 years ago (instead of a new-fangled DVD recorder) and the 17" television my mum loaned to me 10 years ago. I would've bought myself a PC eventually, but I probably wouldn't have upgraded to broadband without the boy's insistence. And I'm pretty darned sure I wouldn't have a 42" plasma television on my living room wall instead of a nice, block-mounted poster of Venice.

But now that I've gotten used to living in a high-tech house, it's all the more upsetting when the gadgets stop working properly.

Last week the boy came home with a new, improved router for our home computer network. Being a computer-whisperer (I tell him that when he fixes his staff's computer problems he should first bend towards the relevant hard drive and talk to it softly, just for effect), he confidently spent the three hours required to reconfigure all the...um...configurations...to get the network connected up via this new router.

And he was really very upset when, less than 24 hours later, I told him that the laptop and the internet connection were no longer on speaking terms. Much cursing and general grumpiness ensued, including an implicit accusation that I did something to the laptop to cause this rift.

I don't know why, because I'm not a complete techno-cretin, but sometimes things stop working around me. VCRs stop recording as programmed, DVDs become "invalid" and home computer networks crash and burn. Maybe it's something to do with leylines, or bad feng shui. Or maybe there are electomagnetic hotspots on my body. Whatever it is, I can actually understand why the boy acts like I'm some sort of anti-Midas.

So now you know why I didn't get online until now, after the boy's gone to sleep, so I could use his computer.

I don't know why I bother

My mum is not only hard of hearing, but also has a memory even worse than mine.

It's a recipe for frustration, really. Whenever I try to tell her anything, I have to repeat it many, many times, each time more loudly. She'll hear me in the end, but forget it after five minutes.



I promise this will be my last grumble about my mum. At least for the rest of this week.

A day with my mum - an oven-roasted self

I just spent the whole day with my mum today, and it was hard - but not in the way I expected.

She's been staying with my brother, having just got out of hospital for an angioplasty; she's now on new meds and we didn't want her to be on her own while she's testing them out. To help out, I offered to entertain Mum during the day while he's at work (his family's away up the coast for a few days), then get her back to his place in time to cook him dinner.

Anyway, I was a bit nervous about spending all day with Mum, because she has a tendency to tell me how to run my life. Even a couple of hours with her could result in high blood pressure and an urgent wish for the boy to transfer to another country.

But it didn't happen that way.

Her critiques on my child-rearing, dress sense and housekeeping ability were minimal. What did bother me was that I ended up sweltering in oven-roasting temperatures all day because my mum is a human popsicle. She was snuggled up in three layers of polar fleece, and still wanting me to turn the heat up. I was stripped down to a (supportive) singlet and rolled-up jeans and still having one long, hot flush.

And of course, she warned me several times that I ought to put on a sweatshirt because it's cold out and she didn't want me to catch a chill.

Kinky boots

What a good film this was.

When it first came out at the cinemas, I wasn't particularly inspired by the reviews I read; it came across as a cross between The Full Monty and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. These are two great movies, but who wants to go see a movie which is as derivative as this one sounded?

But last night we were sitting in front of the telly with a copy of Kinky Boots in front of us, and nothing promising on the telly.

And it turned out to be way better than anticipated. In short, it's about a shoe factory up in the north of England which is in danger of going under due to competition from cheap imports. The young man who's inherited the factory from his dad goes to London in search of buyers, meets a black cross-dressing nightclub performer and comes up with the radical idea of diversifying into women's shoes for men i.e. sexy thigh-high boots for cross-dressers.

It's a feelgood movie, like Monty and Priscilla. It's got a fairly predictable plot, yet it's based on a true story and anyway that very predictability is part of what makes it such a happy movie.

Isn't it nice to watch a movie you thought would be rubbish, and find that it's genius?

The brushing of tiny teeth

Apparently you're supposed to brush your kids' teeth as soon as they start appearing, and this post in Blogging Baby tells you the recommended way to do so.

The Little Madam's teeth-cleaning procedure consists of chewing on the bristles of her little duck-decorated toothbrush, then chucking it overboard in favour of a little plastic cup which she uses to empty bathwater out onto the kitchen floor.

I've tried brushing her teeth for her. I've tried and tried and tried. But TLM just will not let me get the toothbrush anywhere near her mouth. It's much like how she reacts to the sight of a spoonful of food.

Hopefully TLM's brush-chewing action is enough to remove any food that might be stuck to those little incisors (of which there are now five), because even though milk teeth are going to fall out anyway, what kind of mother would I be to allow her daughter to grow black toothlets?

Group bug

It seems that all three of us have colds this weekend. This means that I have little energy and no patience, The Little Madam is whingy and has no appetite, and the boy is sh*t out of luck if he thought he was going to get a break this weekend.

In which I nearly kill the boy with my cooking

Now, I would be the first one to tell you that burgers and anything else made with minced up meat must be cooked thoroughly before eating. And yet I've been guilty of giving the boy a local version of Dehli-belly twice in the last couple of months.

The first time was with a couple of venison burgers. The one I cut into, to test for done-ness, was nice and brown inside. The one one my plate and the second one on the boy's plate had lovely pink interiors. Who knew that commercially processed burgers would need such variable cooking times? (I was fortunate enough to find out before I was halfway through my venison sandwich - the boy had been too hungry to notice.)

The second time was last night, when I decided to make hot dogs out of a packet of Kranskys I got from the supermarket. (There are some strange items in the sausage section at the supermarket these days - I saw some small, purple cocktail sausages with the words "purple cock" typed on the label. I kid you not.) I pan-fried those Kranskys till their respective skins split; surely that was a sign of cookedness? But the boy was apparently in and out of the loo all night (I didn't notice - the only thing that wakes me at night these days is the sound of a baby crying), and I was glad I'd only had one.

As I get older and grumpier, I have moments of insecurity in which I fear that the boy might go off me and leave for someone younger, more pert and better in the kitchen.

Cheeky monkey

Just a quickie, before our crappy Internet service bumps me off again...a photo of our TLM in all her cheeky-monkey glory.

A moment of grumpiness

There's this saying that keeps cropping up - now that I read so much parenting stuff - about how you should spend plenty of time playing with your kids instead of trying to keep your house clean, because when they grow up they aren't going to look back and wish their parents had cleaned the house more.

To that I say rubbish rubbish rubbish.

I'm no Bree van der Kamp (I can't cook, don't keep my house spotless and don't care if TLM wears mis-matched clothes), but I do think it's important to keep to a minimum standard of cleanliness.

The reason people don't look back on their childhoods and wish they're parents had spent more time on the housework might be because they already died from a terrible bacterial infection caused by a dirty toilet.

The stalking shuffle

I haven't posted for a few days because I've been overcome with a nasty tummy bug, possibly that very same virus which felled The Little Madam a couple of weeks ago. Secretly I'd hoped it would lose me a couple of kilos over the weekend - it would have been fair compensation for all the vomiting, stomach cramps and other stuff you won't want to read about in detail - but the bug didn't hit me that hard. Either that, or I had so much excess fat on me that any illness-related weight loss was barely a drop in the ocean of fatness that is my post-pregnancy self.

But I do have an amusing little anecdote about TLM. It's even a short and sweet one...

The Little Madam's bum-shuffling is now a sort of crawl-shuffle; unless she's got something in her hands, she moves forwards by putting both hands down, then shuffling her legs up to her hands. So if you were nearby, you'd hear a distinct thud-shhh...thud-shh as she gets herself around the room.

TLM has also taken to following us into the bathroom. Unlike some parents who think it's a good idea to let their kids see what goes on in the grown-ups toilet, and aren't bothered by the whole lack-of-privacy thing, I prefer to keep the bathroom door closed when I go about my ablutions (especially if they're of the tummy-bug variety).

Now imagine you're me, sitting on the toilet and minding your own business. There's nothing going on in your head, for a change. Then you hear an ominous sound, the sound that goes like this...thud-shh...thud-shhh...thud-shh...which gets louder and louder until it's right outside the toilet door. You sigh in relief that the door is closed. Then it comes...bang! Bang! Bang! You remember that the door's closing mechanism is a little faulty, and sometimes it just opens when there's a strong draft or persistent 13-month-old.

And then...it's only a matter of time before she's caught you with your pants down.

First music love

I tried to instill in The Little Madam a good taste in music. From the library we borrowed classic children's favourites from the Fifties and kid-friendly world music. From my own collection I frequently played Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the album (which I still prefer to Radio Sunnydale), Bach and a selection of lounge-y acid jazz (not trendy, I know, but it comes from a very partying time of my life). Next for TLM's musical education, was going to be some Chemical Brothers.

But all that could be for nothing, because what she really loves to hear is The Wiggles' CD, Big Red Car.

Oh, well.

The song about a dog who barks all night gets her giggling, as does Five Little Joeys (jumping on the bed). It's too cute to sneer at, really.

Baby toupees

The boy sent me the link to this site which sells baby toupees. I think they're for real, too.

If I get the urge to disguise The Little Madam as Donald Trump, Bob Marley, Samuel L Jackson or Li'l Kim, I'll know exactly where to go.

In praise of the boy

Last week the boy came home with a bunch of gorgeous mango-coloured tulips for me, for no reason.

Tonight the boy brought home a bunch of white roses, and it's still not my birthday.

After I jokingly told him that there is nothing sexier than the sight of one's life partner cooking dinner and putting the offspring to bed, he made me dinner and did naptime duty all weekend.

See, he's not just a pair of stunning high cheekbones and fantastic legs worthy of a drag queen, you know.