Wondrously Other: June 2014

Five Awesome Meals For New Parents

When I was pregnant, I was very blessed to have my freezer crammed full of delicious home cooked meals.

They didn't appear one day by magic, I had been asked what we wanted for the new baby and in scandalous tilt at British humility, I answered the question squarely: I wanted things that would give me more time to enjoy my new baby.

Knowing what an amazing impact it had on our lives, I have tried to pay forward the love and cook up a freezer stash for some of my pregnant friends.

After searching for recipes, and remembering the trauma of eating in the early days, I have come up with a list of ideas for anyone wanting to gift a meal to a new parent.

I'm not joking about the trauma by the way; feeding a newborn at mealtime – and my babies always needed to be fed at mealtimes, it was a frickin gift of theirs – usually involved staring at plates of rapidly cooling food that needed more hands than I had free.

These ideas are one hand friendly and cover the major food groups recommended by the all knowing interwebs. Actually they are just tasty recipes that are designed to be eaten while balancing a saggy newborn, the nutrition is just a bonus.

1. The Stew

The grandpappy of spoon food is the stew, so my first share is Asian beef shin by the queen of decadence, Nigella. There are a ton of traditional stew recipes so I shared one that's tasty enough to punch through the haze of near exhaustion.

2. Healthy Spring Rolls

Lamb pastilla look a lot like a Royal Ascot version of the humble spring roll. Made with Filo pastry and baked these little puppies are big on iron but easy on the frying which is great because mama just got done fixing her heart.

Crispy Moroccan Lamb Pastilla by Jamie Oliver

3. Risotto

Fight back against the fog of Baby Brain with smoked fish risotto. This one has the added bonus that it is flavoured with vodka instead of wine. If, like me, it has been a few months since vodka has passed your lips, I'm sure you’ll be overjoyed at having a guilt free reminder of how you got into your current position.

4. The Healthy Burger

Having spent the best part of a year jumping through culinary hoops, I want a bit of junk food indulgence. If you listen to the master of veggie burgers it becomes easy to turn an indulgence into a health food. These sweet potato burgers are actually filling enough to be a meal in themselves but for ease of eating, a few part baked rolls might make welcome company.

5. Not Forgetting Breakfast

You don’t have to be a new mum to think breakfast burritos are an outstanding contribution to the world of convenience food. It’s an entire breakfast. In one hand! That kind of simplistic genius is to be applauded, and then consumed like a rabid wolverine in the thirty seconds before your newborn next fills their nappy.

If you feel inspired to cook for a new mum, I would suggest you Google something sensible like “new foods for mums” to get more ideas but I’ll be honest, the people who have drawn up those pages seem to think that French trimming a rack of lamb makes it finger food.

Instead, my suggestion is simple: cook anything. As long as it’s made with love it will feel like a feast to a new parent. Even if you turn up with a round of peanut butter sandwiches, I can guarantee you’ll be welcomed with open arms. Except to a house with nut allergies, then you should probably just bring a pizza.

Thursday, 26 June 2014 Comments: 2

Alfie Esme

How To Play Hide And Seek

There are a few things you need to know about my son: First, if he is going to do something, he is going to do it properly. Secondly, if he’s going to do something he’s going to win. Always.

Esme: 14, 16, 14, 16, 14, 16

Alfie: no, no, no you only count six

Keith: Alfie, Esme cant count as well as you yet. So you have to be patient and help her. Or why don't you count and Esme hides?

Alfie: Oh yeah. Yeah! ......... Esme, come with me and I'll show you where to hide.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if he and his father played a board game together. Do the basic principles of electrostatics apply to over competitive humans?

Tuesday, 24 June 2014 Comments: 2

Stay At Home Dad Working Mama

Seven Years of Marriage

Bird-Understander

Of many reasons I love you here is one

the way you write me from the gate at the airport

so I can tell you everything will be alright

so you can tell me there is a bird

trapped in the terminal all the people

ignoring it because they do not know

what do with it except to leave it alone

until it scares itself to death

it makes you terribly terribly sad

You wish you could take the bird outside

and set it free or (failing that)

call a bird-understander

to come help the bird

All you can do is notice the bird

and feel for the bird and write

to tell me how language feels

impossibly useless

but you are wrong

You are a bird-understander

better than I could ever be

who make so many noises

and call them song

These are your own words

your way of noticing

and saying plainly

of not turning away

from hurt

you have offered them

to me I am only

giving them back

if only I could show you

how very useless

they are not

by Craig Arnold

Friday, 20 June 2014 Comments: 0

Olive

The Near Disaster Of Miss Olive's First Birthday

I was really struggling to know how to write about Miss Olive’s first birthday without it descending into schmaltz or borderline depression. When it comes to celebrating The Last First Birthday in the family, it’s easy to swing between the two extremes.

Luckily my family saved me from that particular dilemma by providing some “light relief”. By the end of the weekend I was grateful that I will never have to live through another first birthday.

OK so that’s only partly true, I just happen to be at one end of the pendulum swing while I'm writing this.

Anyone who follows my Instagram will have seen that the birthday girl caught the family cold the day before her birthday. It being Miss Olive’s first ever cold she was understandably confused and also severely pissed. I know this because she alternated between hulk smashing my face and nursing through the entire night.

Come the morning of her birthday, the whole family was tired, full of snot, and short on patience.

My plan was to go for a pancake breakfast and then to a local splash pool for some quality family fun; but somewhere between intentions and actually getting off our arses, our disease ridden bodies ran out of steam.

We spent an hour talking to our families over Skype which in reality meant thirty seconds of watching Miss Olive bimble around the lounge and 59 minutes of Alfie shoving Lego creations into the camera and talking incessantly.

Because it’s all about you birthday girl!

Eventually my melodramatic pouting inspired Keith cooked up a batch of pancakes for us all to enjoy; which was fine until the children realised they were only going to get one (large) pancake each and started wailing.

Eat up Miss Olive, plenty more happy memories where they came from!

Then came the near herculean task of dressing the children and pulling together swimming outfits.

I couldn't find swimsuits for either of the girls, and the hand knitted jumper Miss Olive received from her Nana ended up on Esme. On the plus side, it’s going to get well used; on the down side it’s probably going to look a little second hand by the time Olive gets to wear it.

All part of being the youngest Miss Olive!

By the time we got to the swimming pool it was midday, which is lunchtime. Having walked past the cafe and told Alfie at least ten times that we were going swimming BEFORE LUNCH we then had to wait for an eternity until a family changing room became free. Don’t imagine for a moment that waiting for a changing room made Alfie forget about lunch.

I’ll be honest, the day felt like something of a bust by this point but I was determined that Miss Olive was going to get some fun.

Luckily the pool was awesome: The children only tried to drown themselves a handful of times, Miss Olive got to do splashings and we all forgot we were dying of the common cold.

Of course there are no photos of the occasion because you’re not allowed to take photos in public swimming pools these days.

You can’t protect a child too much apparently.

After a few hours we decided it was time to head for some food and, over compensating wildly for the lack of friends and family, I insisted we head to the waterfront for a feast at The Crab Shack.

I won’t lie, going there was about everyone except Miss Olive but she’s one, and she loves chips and pancakes. We could have gone anywhere and as long as she had one of those options she would have been in heaven. Throw ice cream into the mix and I'm going to go ahead and give myself a perfect parent high five.

In your face Pinterest guilt!

Come Sunday and we were all paying the price of doing too much so we mooched to the shops to buy Olive some new sleep suits and some fixing brackets to hang her Mohr Polster swing.

My ace in the hole people!

What could you possibly get a girl who adores swings that would be better than her own personal swing that the weather can’t ruin?

Turns out older siblings can ruin it just fine though, and what I had unwittingly done is turn my third born into a living, breathing piñata.

Bathe in the sibling love Miss Olive.

I may have lost my ever loving shit with the children at this point. In my defence I felt like death and there was a very real danger that they were going to give Miss Olive whiplash.

In their defence they’re children so I felt suitably guilty when they slunk out to the garden to “dig up green shit and leave me the hell alone”.

Because sick me is all about the patience.

No I'm serious. I reckon I was pushing that swing for around an hour before Miss Olive decided she was finished.

That’s about 3,500 very patient pushes.

“She loves to swing”, I thought, “give her unlimited access to swinging”, I thought.

Idiot! Don’t do thinking again!

In the days since her birthday life has settled back into the usual ebb and flow of our routine. I look at Olive and it still feels impossible that she is a whole year old ... but then I have no idea how we came to have a four year old living in the house either.

Such is the witchcraft of children.

Thursday, 19 June 2014 Comments: 0

Breastfeeding Olive Review SNS

A Review of Ecostore Foaming Hand Wash

When I was asked to review the ecostore foaming hand wash, I thought I would write a review that talked about how four year olds are made entirely of mud and snot and how this soap was so much fun it even made them want to get clean.

I spent some time on the ecostore website so I would feel like I could speak with authority about its goodly credentials and I was blown away to learn that there are only 9 chemicals in the Foaming Hand Wash, and all of them have an awesome safety rating.

The lack of nasties made me feel comfortable that I wasn't exposing my children to anything that would poison them, even if the amazing fragrances made it difficult to persuade them that they weren't supposed to be eaten.

Then my life happened and this review turned into something completely different.

We have a chilli bush which this year grew a vast array of very red and very spicy little chillies. When I say vast array I am being conservative so on Saturday when I was relatively child free, I wrapped Miss Olive on my back and attacked the bush with scissors and a bowl.

She slept soundly through my long and torturous harvest. She slept soundly thought my search for a needle and thread. She even slept soundly while I stabbed chilli after chilli onto a long garland to be hung and dried.

Eventually she woke and, as she so often does, realised that she had a serious hunger and MUST BE FED NOW.

As her in-house slave I rushed to the fridge, grabbed her feeder and hustled to the sofa. A few seconds later I had untied her, attached the SNS, and she began to nurse.

Trapped under a feeding baby, my thoughts drifted back to the truck load of super hot chillies and how I was going to get rid of them when two fifths of the family are chilli-phobic. My thoughts drifted, but wouldn't settle because something was bugging me, something baby shaped and fussy.

Miss Olive was squirming and trying to nurse, but something was putting her off. I assumed she was teething and held down her feeder with my finger while latching her on again, smiling encouragingly at her for good measure.

No dice.

Now Miss Olive was clearing her throat to make known her unhappiness.

I sighed, dropping my head to wipe hair and tiredness from my face.

I felt the sting a split second before my brain registered what I had done.

The heat was spreading and tears were starting to fall from my eye onto the baby who was now spluttering at the heat in her mouth and the isolated rain shower that seemed to have sprung up above her face.

The chillies. My hands. How could I have been so stupid?!?

Because babies steal your brains faster than any zombie, that’s how.

So trapped under a now howling baby, blind in one eye and desperately trying not to touch ANYTHING, I was forced to make some hard choices.

The first choice was to deposit the extremely angry baby on the sofa by standing up and rolling her gently off my lap. Landing in a pile of cushions, none of which were feeding her milk, did nothing to improve her mood so the soundtrack to my half blind stumble into the kitchen was in the same ballpark as that of an axe murder.

Somehow I found myself in front of the sink and faced with a line-up of cleaning products. Wrestling the tap on full with my wrists my mind wandered back to the ingredients list of the Foaming Hand Wash.

“It’s full of GOOD THINGS!!” my brain said, ”safe enough to wash everything you need to wash and not poison the baby”

That was a good enough selling point for me because the one thing that would have made this whole debacle worse would have been that awkward conversation with a medical professional about how I had managed to poison my baby with both chilli AND cleaning products.

My scent of choice, should you be wondering, was Cucumber and Bergamot, because for some reason my brain came up with the logic that cucumber is cooling and that would be a good thing to reverse the effects of chilli.

Sometimes I think it’s lucky for the world that my job doesn't involve heavy machinery.

And if I am being entirely honest, there was a part of me wondering whether the “gentle cleansers” were going to be able to cut through the napalm like quality of my hands while praying that the claims of leaving my skin “soft, silky and clean without drying or irritation” were accurate; especially since some of that skin formed an integral and very sensitive part of my baby feeding system ifyaseewhatImean.

I'm happy to report that the claims were accurate on both counts. After a good wash both my hands, and boobs were back in working order. It look me some time and a lot of cuddles to persuade a reproachful baby that the coast was clear, but I think the gentle fragrance helped take her mind off the searing pain in her mouth long enough to feed.

I think ecostore should brag about this whole episode in the tagline of their next advert:

Foaming Handwash: Your baby will prefer it to chilli boobs!

You're welcome ecostore, you’re welcome.

Thank you to Kiwi Mummy Blogs for sending me that little slice of awesome.

Tuesday, 17 June 2014 Comments: 4

Esme Olive Stay At Home Dad Toddler DoOm

The Brutal World of Toddler Revenge

I have something of a love/ hate relationship with dummies.

On the one hand they are ugly lumps of plastic that are going to make my girls talk like Daffy Duck.

On the other hand there’s quiet ... and sanity; both compelling reasons to make your peace with your children talking like Daffy Duck.

Recently we mislaid Olive’s dummy and I offered to buy Esme any treat she wanted, anything in the whole wide world, if she let Miss Olive have use of her dummy overnight.

She lasted 2 hours.

Then we entered a period of feverish negotiation where the baby was wailing, I was begging and Esme was giving us both the shark eye.

It was pretty brutal.

Luckily a spare dummy was found under a car seat.

Thick with dust and smelling slightly of cheese it wasn't something I would imagine giving to my child, but it’s amazing how much you can ignore your personal standards when the alternative is a rabid spitting, toddler.

Miss Olive clearly took note of Esme’s lack of sharing because in the brutal world of toddler justice, revenge is clearly a dish best served cold.

Thursday, 12 June 2014 Comments: 2

Attachment Parenting Esme

Middle Child Syndrome

I want to resist the convenience of labelling my children, especially when it comes to things like birth order and kinship.

I remember being a child who was told “I know you better than you know yourself” and wondering if I was such a simple creation, that a parent could see me laid bare before I even knew myself.

My children are of me and their father, but each of them is so much more than the sum of those parts.

The challenge to me as a mama is to give each of them the space to grow free of my definition.

That is especially true of Esme, saddled with an assumption of being trapped between the vanguard and the baggage train.

The more I slow down and look at her, I mean really look at her, the more I realise how little I see when I think of her as “her mother’s daughter” or “a middle child”.

The Esme I see is the girl who insists on mothering me as much as I mother her.

Who runs quickly to the scene of any raised voices with calming hands outstretched and a firm "enough, enough".

Who carries her sister into the lounge when she has been discovered raiding the Lego table; Olive’s face set in a frown, her limbs limp in silent protest.

Who takes her brother in her arms and comforts him even when moments earlier he was unkind to her.

Who spots even the smallest injury and insists on knowing whether I am hurt: “You OK, mama? You OK?” and then the almost imperceptible nod when I confirm I am fine.

And oh! Her cuddles! There is nobody on this earth who gives hugs as wonderful. Wrapped in her arms it’s impossible not to feel a sense of peace.

She is my rare, precious mother hen, in all her complex, individual glory.

Tuesday, 10 June 2014 Comments: 2

Alfie Attachment Parenting Toddler DoOm

Good News!! My Son Finally Plays Well With Others!!

On Saturday we were invited by a friend to join her family’s olive harvest. I was giddy about the idea of combing trees for the day but, as always, I was terrified that Alfie might do something that would mean I might never be able to speak to my friend again.

This is the boy who floored a toddler at a birthday party and got me bawled out in front of a room full of parents. It might be two years ago but that kind of experience stays with you like the nightmare where you turn up to school naked.

Then there was the time we went for a walk with the local home-schooling group and he managed to poke a boy in the eye with a stick and hit him in the head with a rock. Oh, and by the way, we’re in the middle of nowhere and the boy’s parents are the ones who know the way back to the car park. Yeah, that wasn't awkward at all.

Toe curling moments like those mean that each time we go out in public my brain is consumed with begging Alfie not to have a brain fart.

It’s frickin exhausting.

All through Saturday I waited for the carnage to start, for the meal to be ruined, for the ornaments to be smashed, for the olives to be scattered; but those moments never came.

In fact, Alfie nailed it.

He was funny, loveable, helpful and generally all the things I see when there’s nobody else around.

I was convinced we had dodged a bullet, and that Sunday's birthday party was going to turn into a complete car crash.

The universe loves balance after all.

The party was held at a soft play area; a shiny, brightly coloured, sugar fuelled, indoor hell and it was scheduled for The Afternoon. In our house that’s the period of time between lunch and bedtime where all three children run on empty while not napping.

All through the party I steeled myself for the sound of birthday boy losing teeth, or parent threatening a restraining order but once again those moments never came.

As we relaxed on the sofa that evening I looked down at my boy curled up in my arms and finally saw what Keith has been telling me for the longest time: Alfie has grown up and changed.

I’d been holding on to my fear of public humiliation for so long I’d become Chicken Licken while the family had moved on without me.

Which is why when Alfie looked up at me and asked if his friend could come for a play date, the scream inside my head was only barely audible.

Thursday, 5 June 2014 Comments: 4

Working Mama

I Am Working Mama

When I get up in the morning I fall out of bed having had too little sleep, shuffle through a mountain of washing in the semi darkness and try to put together something that won’t get me fired from my job for looking like a hobo or a hooker.

By the time I walk out of the door, the triumph of positive mental attitude means that I have persuaded myself that I am a poster girl for working mamas everywhere.

My confidence oozes out of every pore as I walk down the street, my stride long and purposeful as I pass shop fronts and check out my reflection.

Then I get into work and look in the mirror.

That’s when I realise I have baby spit all over my shoulder and crusty cereal residue on my cuff.

I am wearing odd socks and pants that come up further than my trousers.

The hanging loops of my cardi are flapping and the hair that looked so cute at home has exploded into fluff.

Now, stuck at work with no access to clothes or hair-dryer, I have to become a master fixer upper, an ignorer of imperfections, a carry on regardlesser.

I am working mama, hear my slightly second hand roar.

Tuesday, 3 June 2014 Comments: 2

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