What do you do with a baby who will only swallow soft food, but refuses to be spoon fed. Oh, unless it’s pudding. Pudding can be spooned in, but not savoury or breakfast. We have had some success with pasta dishes, but Bernard can’t eat pasta all the time, can he? Yesterday I gave him dollops of mixed bean pate with cream cheese and millet, but he flung that far and wide.

Jarfood is no longer an option, unless you catch him on an unusually compliant day, or it’s lumpy enough to be scooped up in baby handfuls and wiped across his face, with some of it occasionally going in.

Finger food usually has to be soft; anything hard (like breadsticks) or lumpy (like any large pieces that he bites off) gets spat out, sometimes spectacularly.

If the food is sticky enough, B will sometimes play with the spoon, holding it by the foody end and licking the handle. We persist with this, because the only sensible route seems to be to wait patiently for him to learn how to use it himself. If a parent waves a spoon anywhere near his face, he screeches.

Fiddly finger food meals take a long, long time and a lot of newspaper on the floor, and for these reasons I prefer to feed him at home, before and after his afternoon with the childminder. Today he has a one-off full Tuesday with her, and apparently he will be taking lunch in the Asda cafe. Hahahahaha good luck with that, childminding lady.

I squeal in alarm!!

Pete looks concerned as I shrink away from a fearsome creature on the conservatory floor. Realising that the creature is not a creature at all, but the fallen petal of a geranium, dancing gently in the breeze, I try to look nonchalant, but Pete is a veritable knight in shining armour and wants to make sure I’m alright.

I thought that geranium petal was a spider, I say lightly.

That pink petal? he asks.

I nod.

That bright pink petal? he says, somewhat repetitively.

I nod again.

You thought a pink petal was a spider? He seems slow to get the point.

I was seeing it out of the corner of my eye, where there are fewer colour receptors, I explain.

For once, Science is on my side.

It’s Breastfeeding Awareness Week, and I’ve been too busy and tired to make the most of it here (and apparently 34Sp have done something weird that has messed up the page anyway). I had my counselling tutorial today, and the tutor has renamed it Breastfeeding Bashing Week. I think she is feeling somewhat bitter that the media has objected so loudly to what they perceive as an attempt to make mothers feel guilty if they didn’t breastfeed for long. Sigh. As if anyone ever needs to go out of their way to make mothers feel guilty; and if it isn’t breastfeeding, then it will be something else. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there: here’s a little survey.

If you are pregnant, or you’re a parent of either the male or the female persuasion, or even if you don’t have kids but still have a pair of braincells to rub together, answer me this: prior to having a baby, what are/were/might be your expectations of breastfeeding? Just a glib sentence will do, but feel free to write me an essay if it helps you to exorcise some of that natural parental guilt.

The iceberg has finally breached the surface. A tooth, and nothing but a tooth, at last!