• They’ll all be fighting over her, won’t they? One girl and seven boys in our antenatal group.
• You can’t dress him in pastels! I most certainly can; he’s three weeks old.
• Here is my gift. It is a pack of bibs that all say “trouble” and “naughty boy” and “scamp” on them.
• School is boring, isn’t it? Seriously, why would an adult say that to a curious, bright, enthusiastic child?
• Who’s your best friend? All groups split into factions. Make sure you pick the right one, kid.
• Eat it all up like a good boy and then you can have some pudding. Plenty of research supports my decision to allow him to control his own appetite, and not learn that pudding is a reward. It’s a good theory, anyhow.
• Be a good boy so Father Christmas brings you lots of presents. Don’t get me started.
• Train sets are for babies. Have this toy gun instead.
• You don’t need to be breastfeeding anymore! circa 12 months old
• Ugh, nasty broccoli!
• Eek, a spider/bee/mouse! I tried so very hard not to pass my phobias on to him. It really sucks to have had this completely undermined by a childminder.

I accidentally got stuck in a feminist internet forum discussion about the joys of being childless. It was a horrible, horrible place, and I am struggling to articulate why without sounding all kneejerk. I don’t think I’m somehow better than other women who don’t have children. But it does seem like maybe I have a little insight into certain aspects of womanhood that are difficult to understand if you don’t.

Seems like just like any other label, there are so many different ways of being a feminist, and too many people out there claiming that they have the one true way. I don’t have to be a career woman or a prize winning author or a pop icon; I don’t have to be a lesbian or a tomboy or childless-by-choice; I don’t have to be an earth mother or a self-proclaimed witch or a SAHM or a sex kitten or a dominatrix or ANYTHING other than a human being who understands that in a patriarchal society, being a woman is inevitably undervalued.

Sitting here in my corner of the world, of course I see things from the perspective of a mother and a breastfeeding counsellor. I see that breastfeeding is a feminist activity because women who don’t have to buy formula are in some ways free from commercial and societal pressures, which come from the ‘oh little girl, of course your silly body can’t be trusted to do something important like feed a baby’ part of mankind. Seriously. [I was about to write a disclaimer about non-breastfeeding mothers, but if you've got this far down the post you must surely not find this necessary]. In modern Britain, motherhood is only valued insofar as it represents a marketing demographic. However much ‘family friendly’ employment guidance the last government pushed through [and the tories will abolish that as soon as they can], mothers are still encouraged back to work, full time, as early as possible, in order to be economically viable – with the bonus of creating jobs in the childcare industry.

We are routinely advised to mistrust our bodies and our instincts from the moment we become pregnant. Only a select few take non-NHS antenatal classes, and those are portrayed as idealistic not realistic, when what NCT and similar organisations try to do is remind us that our bodies can do amazing things like create, carry, give birth to, and nourish a child; while the NHS continues the party line that our bodies should be controlled by doctors because we have no idea what to do with them, not having medical degrees. Whose interests does this serve? Not the mothers’, that’s for damn certain.

How can celebrating motherhood not be feminist? And why does it have to be so divisive? Surely all aspects of woman have value, not just the fun or economically viable parts?

• So where are you going for Christmas, mate?

• I’m going back home to Wales to me mum and dad.

• Oh right, whereabouts in Wales do they live?

• Hereford.

• Oh. Where’s that, like, in relation to Swansea and Cardiff?

• Worcestershire.

• Right. Are you gonna be mashin it up yeah?

• Yeah.

One of the several pagan origins of the tradition of some character visiting all the children in the night and giving presents, was La Befana, an Italian witch. However, as this website points out:

In many cultures the relations between grown-ups and children is based on the observance of rules achieved through the fear of punishments and expectations of reward.

And we try not to parent in that way.

Santa Claus is a symbol of consumerism, greed, and too many toys. While it may not be true that the Coca-Cola Company dressed him in corporate red, I find it impossible to disassociate that image from the fizzy giant and all their misdemeanours.

On the whole, we try not to lie to Bernard. If we tell him fairy tales, we will explain that they are stories. When we talk about why people celebrate christmas, we will explain both the mythology of the birth of Jesus, and the fact that most people in this country are not celebrating said birth when they celebrate at christmas-time. But when parents pretend to their children that some strange man has broken into their home and left toys at the end of their beds, they do work quite hard to prevent the truth from coming out. How then do I explain about Say No To Strangers?

I know this sounds curmudgeonly. But I’m not saying Bernard won’t get presents, and I’m not forbidding the grandmothers from doing christmas stockings, as they both feel morally bound to do. But I will tell the truth, including the fact that the stockings will be provided whether he is good all year or not.

Sorry Bruce.

So basically, Tumble Tots is asking the parents to raise money. And frankly, I’m too old to be going round my family with a sponsor form. And he is too young. I have adopted the position that when he can come to me and explain what he is doing to raise money, and who he is raising it for, and why they need it, then I will sponsor him. We already pay fees to Tumble Tots; if they want to pass a portion of that to charity, then I will be impressed by their efforts at social responsibility. But they’re not using my son to do their greenwash for them.

Alice texted (of course) to say if we sponsor Bernard, will you sponsor Stan?

Sometimes I feel like I sprout another head every time I speak to her.

And by immediately, I mean impossible to avoid, and I crash straight into it. I note later that it’s a Merc, and it’s for sale, and I hope I have done it some damage. At the time I am too busy crashing to the ground with my bike on top of me, and the main thing that is going through my head is thank god Bernard isn’t on the bike. As I fell I felt my ankle crunch.

I lie on my back looking at the sky, saying aaargh, aaargh in a loud voice (which surprises me). Two men get out of the car and say sorry about that love. Didn’t know this was a cycle lane.

It is, I confirm. Then angrily add, Don’t have a go at me. I sit up and rub my ankle, wondering how bad it is.

Who’s having a go at you? they say, as they pick up my bike and move it to the grass verge. Then they walk off.

I sit on the pavement watching as they disappear, and then I pull myself to my feet and pick up my bike. Then the shock hits me and I stand there taking deep breaths. A pedestrian wanders past without even looking at me. I feel a sense of outrage that no-one bothered to help me. No-one checked if I am okay, if I can get home, or if my bike is damaged.

My bike seems alright but the basket is pretty mangled. The car is for sale, and the two men appear to have been a salesman and a client. I can walk, and so I do. What else is there to do?

At home I call Pete and I cry a lot, and my ankle hurts but probably not badly enough to sue anyone, but I feel so horrified that nobody cared enough to help me up off the ground. How badly do you have to injure someone before you offer them your hand?

I have been experimenting recently with the organic toothpastes from Kingfisher, Green People, and Weleda. The Weleda one in particular tasted delicious, but they all leave one’s mouth feeling a bit furry after a little while; you don’t get that highly-polished effect that you get from the scrubby stuff in real toothpaste. So I decided to alternate natural and real, and last night we cracked open a new tube of Sainsbo’s Total Care, relishing the thought of having shiny clean teeth again after weeks of tree-huggery. [I should emphasise that neither of us has noticeably suffered with bad breath; the non-minty toothpaste seems to increase the amount of effort put into actually brushing one's teeth].

But this morning I happened to look at the ingredients, and oh what a mistake that was. Concerns about fluoridation aside, what about this Triclosan? The Swedish, who know a lot about teeth, no longer use this nasty carcinogenic endocrine disrupting poison in toothpaste. It has been found in breastmilk^[1] and in fish, which suggests that it is bioaccumulative – yet we put this stuff in our mouths?

Pete mentioned yesterday that his mint of choice was now the Trebor Extra Strong Mint, because it was the only one that doesn’t contain artificial sweeteners. Sorry Pete, but your toothpaste has Sorbitol in it, and so does the baby toothpaste (which at least has no Triclosan).

So the dilemma is, do we continue to ingest small quantities of disgusting, or do we learn to live with the slightly less polished mouthfeel of natural toothpaste?

1. cow’s milk obviously also contains environmental pollutants, and breastmilk still offers wide-ranging protection against many childhood and adult illnesses. Breastmilk is still the most appropriate food for a human baby. [↩]

The solar energy companies don’t want you to know this, though. Not unless you’re prepared to sit through a couple of hours of sales spiel [while your toddler plays up by throwing things around the room and climbing on the furniture; but who can blame him when he's being completely ignored for such a long time?]. And yet it is pointless to tell them when they call to make the appointment, that all you want to know is how much it costs, because you know you definitely want to buy it, it’s just a question of whether or not you can afford to buy it now. They won’t tell you. They want you to hear the spiel.

So it’s a bit unreasonable of the salesman to look so sulky when you tell him you can’t possibly afford it. Not even if they do give us £25 for every appointment we manage to get them once it is installed.

The handset returned from its visit to the hospital with no explanation, and the words software upgrade on the paperwork. Sounds to me as though they were unable to replicate the problem, so they just did the standard nonsense and sent it back. Meanwhile I had spent two weeks with a loan handset which wasn’t even the same brand, and when my SIM was put back into my own handset, all formatting had been lost. It had the Nokia ringtone, FFS.

Inevitably, the fault persisted, and I did nothing about it for ages, until tonight. Alice called. I flipped open the handset, and it switched itself off. I listened to her and tried to prevent Bernard from throwing CDs across the room, and then when she had gone I phoned t-mobile. Four times.

Call Number 1: I explain nicely to a girl called Lindsey that I have flu, and a fractious toddler, and my phone keeps switching itself off. She says she can’t help but she’ll put me through to the technical team. I hold for half an hour and give up when the music enters its third loop.

Call Number 2: I explain nicely to a girl called Emma what just happened, and she goes to talk to her manager. [Hold]. She says she needs to ring me back on my landline so that I can give her the serial number of my phone. She calls back after about five minutes, I give her the serial number, she says that because she called me, she can’t put me through to repairs, but if I call in again on the same number as before, they will connect me immediately.

Call Number 3: I tell someone that Emma says they can put me straight through, and they tell me the queue is over two minutes long. I take the risk and get straight through to someone called Alison, who listens sympathetically and asks me all the same questions that I have answered for Lindsey and Emma. After I have given her the full story, I lose signal and get cut off.

Call Number 4: A man called Gavin greets me and I explain the story so far. He asks me all the security questions yet again, even though I’ve just told him what’s on the screen in front of him. He doesn’t know who I spoke to in the Repair Team, but says he will put me on hold while he finds out how long the queue is. I hold for another five minutes or so, and then lose signal and get cut off.

Having spent an hour of my Friday night on this project, I give up.

The man at the door was wearing an ID badge from Southern Electric. He introduced himself as being from The Electricity Board, and waved at his ID tag as proof that he existed. He told me that he had that very morning been given an “emergency print-out” that included my property, and confirmed my address with me, even though he was standing on my doorstep.

And what do you think that emergency was? I’m paying too much for my electricity! I am on the wrong tariff! On noes! Worlds will collide! Total protonic reversal. Etc.

I asked him in what way that was an emergency, and he agreed that it was. That made no sense. Before he could go any further, I folded my arms in proper housewife style, and told him that claiming to represent The Electricity Board is misleading, as there is no Electricity Board as such, and he clearly works for Southern Electric. Telling me that there is an emergency is misleading, because this is obviously not an emergency of any kind. Combining those two things and going to the doors of elderly or vulnerable people is highly unethical behaviour, because he is not from The Electricity Board, there is no emergency, and he is actually trying to sell electricity. I am going to telephone Southern Electric now to complain, I told him.

Okay, bye, he said, and slunk off. I went and made my phone call.

For Ade, here are three things that I would put into Room 101.

Claire Verity, G*** F***, and other advocates of rigidly prescriptive routine-based baby management systems.

Human beings are so arrogant when they assume that, with regard to the care of a newborn baby, they know better than nature. I’m sure by now you will be aware of the hideously unethical “experiment” being shown on Channel 4, Bringing Up Baby. The only good thing about this show is that surely any sane human being can see the ill-conceived cruelty of shutting a one-day old baby in its room and letting it cry. Even the founding “expert” who developed this method didn’t actually have mothers shove their babies in prams and leave them outside for three hours at a time, whatever the weather. In fact Frederick Truby King^[1] actually writes about baby and mother spending time outside, getting lots of fresh air, and playing together. Well-documented, and frankly equally unethical experimentation on rhesus monkeys in the 1960s show physical and psychological problems developing, where baby monkeys are deprived of affection.^[2].

Scheduling newborn babies prevents mothers from learning to communicate with their child. Obviously there is no need to understand how a baby tells you he is hungry, if he isn’t due a feed for another two hours anyway. This undermines the growth of confident mothering, and of course makes it impossible to establish successful breastfeeding.

People who don’t give a f*** about the environment.

It really upsets me that one of my closest friends can’t be bothered to recycle, and never walks if her car is looking lonely and unloved on her driveway, which apparently it always is. It also upsets me that a member of my family jets off here and there around the world without ever considering the CO₂ emissions he is responsible for. I know that I personally take eco-living to more of an extreme than your average man dropping litter on the street, but I do get pissed off when people dismiss something that I think is a hugely important social responsibility. How hard is it, really, to pick one or two things that you could do better? I’m not expecting everyone to start using crystal deodorant^[3] or install a wormery^[4] but really, how hard is it to sort your rubbish into the boxes that the council provides for you? That’s just bloody lazy and ignorant, that is.

Bloggers who go on and on and on and on about their book deals.

Because that’s not what I want to read about, and it’s not why they got a book deal. No, this isn’t sour grapes. I’m very happy for the bookdeal bloggers who continue to be interesting, but bored stupid by the ones who want to tell me about every single call they get from their agent.

1. a nutter [↩]
2. this is a gross oversimplification, but you’re welcome to google [↩]
3. but why not? it works, it’s cheaper, and it’s better for the environment [↩]
4. but why not? it’s reasonably low maintenance, and you never have to buy plant food or compost again [↩]

I liked Cas’s casual style, and the recipes were always easy, interesting, cheap, and quick: perfect for students. So when I saw that she had also written a book called Great Grub For Toddlers, I rushed out (to the Amazon Marketplace, as it’s out of print) and bought one. Oh. Dear. Me.

We start with some general waffle about making mealtimes fun for kids, not forcing them to eat stuff, etc etc; all well and good. Then the first chapter, entitled Helpful Hints, gives a lot of detail about the first few weeks of breastfeeding. She tells us that it might hurt, but you must persist as it is the best possible food for your baby. She doesn’t mention that if it does hurt, then you should contact a breastfeeding counsellor, because there is probably something wrong with the position of the baby, and with a little help, you can stop it from hurting. Sigh.

She compounds this oversight with the following advice: After you have been breastfeeding for a while you will have to try and express your milk because until you do this you are always tied to the baby… – and this I have a problem with. For one thing, some people actually don’t resent their children, and have no problem with being tied to them. So many women are stuck with the chore of unnecessary expressing because they are advised to escape their babies as soon as possible. Expressing and cup- or bottle-feeding WILL have a detrimental effect on the mother’s milk supply. Cas Clarke is not a breastfeeding counsellor, not a paediatrician, not a nutritionist. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Writing a recipe book is one thing, but giving ridiculous breastfeeding advice in a book aimed for the mothers of toddlers seems a bit stupid. Between crash dieting and formula supplementing, it’s impressive that she managed to feed her children to four or five months, which is a relatively good stint, statistically speaking.

Her breastfeeding advice ends with the following sop to formula feeding mothers:

Just hold on to the fact that when you look around you, can you spot the people who were breastfed as children? I know I can’t!

Because appearances are all that matter.

The next chapter is on weaning, and granted this book was written over ten years ago, when advice was to wean around four months. But she didn’t even manage that:

I first tried James on baby rice at eleven weeks old – and he wasn’t content with just a teaspoonful, from the beginning he had two tablespoons! [...] I thought we were going to have to wean Helena even earlier. At nine weeks old she was showing all the signs, chomping anything that came near her mouth, long bouts of crying and generally driving her parents completely round the bend.

She appears to be quite unaware that babies chomp, cry and generally drive their parents round the bend because they’re babies. Not because they want to eat solids. Their guts are not mature enough to process solids, and they are at increased risk of allergies and obesity for such ridiculously early weaning. This all comes from the school of Generations Of Mothers Can’t Be Wrong. Oh can’t they? I do believe that the generations of mothers to whom we are referring here, are those mothers who were first sucked in by the manufacturers of wonderful, convenient, better-than-breastmilk baby formula, back in the fifties when it really was just a dairy industry by-product.

Clarke goes on to recommend hungry baby formula if the solids and milk feeds aren’t satisfying the baby. Myth! Babies are designed to be hungry so that they feed little and often to grow properly. Giving hungry baby formula gives their brain receptors the wrong signals for being full. Then, she says, at six months it is best to swap to a ‘follow-on’ milk as these have a higher iron content which babies of this age need. Myth! Follow-on milk is totally unnecessary, and was only developed to allow formula manufacturers a loophole in the law that says they cannot promote formula that is intended for newborns.

Obviously the baby part of the book is dedicated to mush, and there are fifteen pages of “recipes” for cooking and pureeing different vegetables and fruit. All the weaning books pad out their first few pages in the same way, when in fact all that is necessary is a general instruction on how to cook, puree, and freeze a piece of fruit or a vegetable. There are very few things that need specific advice, and even they can be covered in a single paragraph (banana, avocado, mango).

The remainder of the book is given over to the toddler recipes, most of which look suspiciously like the ones I used to love in Grub On A Grant, but with more marmite. I already own that book, so I really didn’t need this one. The moral of the story: don’t buy books on Amazon, because you can’t see inside them and find out how much they are going to irritate you!

I have tried to contact Ikea about this, but the only option they offer is a chatroom. Since I swore of chatrooms a few years ago, I’m not prepared to participate in such nonsense.

My current pair of Ikea slippers has a hole that nearly goes right through. I don’t think they will last until June, when I apparently need some sensible rubber-soled slippers for hospital. I am slipperless, and quite distraught about it.

He uses this when he wants to say something is superficial, like an investigation.

He uses it in board meetings when he wants to sound like someone with a grasp of the longer, more medical-sounding words in the language.

He gets it wrong, and says epidural instead.

Forgive me Krissa.