I really tried to stick to the recipe; however I wasn’t prepared to splash out on baby new potatoes when I have a veg drawer full of muddy old farmers market spuds; and also I didn’t have enough peas when I looked in the freezer, so it had sweetcorn in it too.

It was easy to make, certainly no harder than the sausage and lentil version; and it came out quite gooey and delicious. Pete and Bernard both enjoyed it, and it was all I could do to stop Pete from eating my lunch portion as well. If I make this again, I might completely replace the peas with sweetcorn, and I would certainly stick with the old spuds, which mushed beautifully into the sauce.

The recipe for this was emailed to me by Lisa, about two years ago. I had a glut of cabbage at the time. I reproduce it here in full, and she can tell you where she nicked it from:

Preheat oven to 170C. Heat 1 tbsp olive oil and 10 g butter until v hot then fry 6 slices chopped streaky bacon for a couple of mins. Add 4 thick pork chops and brown each side; transfer chops and bacon to a roasting tin. Add 1 small chopped onion and 2 sliced cloves garlic to the pan until softened then scatter over the chops. Bubble 310 ml cider in the pan for 2 mins, season, and pour over chops too. Cover roasting tin w foil and put in oven for 50 mins. Remove tin from oven (no!) and add 1 shredded savoy cabbage, mixing it into the juices and keeping the chops on top. Return tin to oven, uncovered, for 20-25 mins until the cabbage is tender. Put the chops on a warm plate white you stir 3 tbsp creme fraiche and 1 tbsp grainy mustard into the cabbage.

Apart from having to call Pete at work and demand that he buy cider on the way home, it was really easy to do and tasted delicious. Plus there were three cans of Scrumpy Jack left in the fridge.

We talked about how my body doesn’t make milk anymore because your body doesn’t need it. I said I understood that you do still need the cuddles, and we’re having a cuddly bedtime story instead. You said my dressing gown is very snuggly.

I don’t know whether it’s a good or bad thing that this happened just before I go away for a training weekend, and will miss you for three bedtimes in a row, the longest we’ve ever been apart. I know you are better at going to sleep for daddy when I’m not here, and you’re old enough to understand that, just like the Owl Babies’ mother, I will always come back (you do think a lot).

Breastfeeding you has changed my life.

When I meet mums-to-be, I remember my pregnant self and my determined focus on breastmilk, the product. I simply had no expectation of the process. No experience, no understanding, no conception of what it was like to hold a baby in my arms and feed him from my body. I knew that not all mums manage to breastfeed, and assumed that they just didn’t want it enough. That’s not true, by the way.

You and me, we didn’t find it easy at first. We found it desperately, devastatingly difficult. We were a mess, but lots of people helped us, and eventually it resolved itself, somehow. I can remember setting a date to stop by if it didn’t get any better (which I think would have been about 16 weeks, but I’m not really sure). Your dad said he had always thought we would just breastfeed for a year and never need formula; he was very matter-of-fact about it, and I was quite taken aback at the time. (Usually, men say things like whatever decision you want to make, I’ll support you, which is incredibly unhelpful).

Anyway, the date passed without me noticing, just like your colic disappeared without me noticing; and one morning I observed that there was some sort of pattern to our days, and neither of us was crying quite so often. It was like we’d been struggling along against the current, and finally emerged into calm water.

At six months I decided you would start stopping. I needed you to take a bottle when I went back to work, so that’s what you would do. I still had a lot to learn about babies and their personal timetables. You didn’t want to eat solid food, you wouldn’t drink from a bottle or a cup, and you certainly weren’t interested in stopping breastfeeding. We wasted an entire box of formula, I went back to work, and you obstinately waited until I came home and then fed pretty much constantly until I went back out again. Over and over again, I realise that life is much easier for all of us if I don’t try to impose adult rhythms on you, constructs and expectations that are meaningless to you. Sometimes it’s hard to see the world from your perspective, but when I do, it makes a surprising amount of sense.

You were 8 months old when I started training as a breastfeeding counsellor. As my tutor said, already statistically insignificant. Breastfeeding by then was my most powerful parenting tool, and one of the few ways I had to get you off to sleep. The more I learned about it, the happier I was to keep on doing it. I didn’t plan this from the start; we just gradually evolved into a breastfeeding pair who were in it for the full term. Or possibly, I evolved, and you were always that way inclined.

There are some memorable moments that I want to record here for you.

At one point during those first difficult weeks, I went to see a LLL leader who sat with me so patiently, and talked to me about getting the position right and waiting for you to open your mouth properly wide. That was our first non-painful feed, and you came off the breast drunken and sated. Although we still had a lot of pain over the next few weeks, just knowing that was possible kept me going.

Hot nights sleeping with you on the spare bed at our old house, you feeding all night, me giving up on the nipple shields because it was too much hassle to sterilise them every time you took a break.

My stepdad parking himself on the sofa for about a week, just after you were born, and saying that lad loves his groceries, doesn’t he? every time I fed you.

Feeding you on the beach in Cornwall, under a sarong, on a sandcastle island made by Pete. At 14 months, that may have been the last time I fed you in public.

A couple of times you’ve had stomach bugs, and couldn’t eat anything. Milk was the only thing you could keep down. Goodness knows what I’ll give you next time.

Once you fell over and banged your knee, and mama milk was the only thing that would help. Afterwards you told me that when you drink it, it goes down into your legs to make them better. You also once told me that milk comes from cows, and I drink it with my head, and it goes into you.

We may never talk about it again. You seem pretty sanguine about the whole thing, and I’m kind of glad it’s happened in this low-key way. Thank you for the experience.

Mama.

It’s very simple. All you have to do is pledge to make one new dish each week (or something you haven’t made for absolutely ages), blog about it and leave me a comment so we can have a round-up.

Your new dish can be something someone else made previously – a cookalong, if you will.

Who wants to play?

I could blame general tiredness and lack of free time, but really, there is time to cook. There is less opportunity to shop, but surely that’s just a question of getting organised. I have more recipe books than is strictly necessary, considering I never open them.

I could blame my unsatisfactorily small kitchen, and the fact that when I do spend any time in there cooking, I usually have a child clinging to my knee or fiddling with the egg timer until it breaks. Since he was born, we have had three new kitchen timers.

I suspect it is pure laziness and some sort of lack of motivation. On the whole, we have a balanced diet; just not particularly varied. Should try harder.

I still come home buzzing, almost every time. There are some classes that leave me feeling dissatisfied, but my feedback tends to be positive, so hopefully the clients didn’t feel the same way. I love a group that is reasonably well-informed, interested in the science, and laughs at my jokes.

I would never have imagined that I would enjoy standing up in front of a group of strangers for two hours, and talking. Actually I do try not to do all the talking; I am supposed to facilitate discussion. I have been getting better at doing that, to the extent that I now find we’re still yapping one hour into the session, and I have to shoehorn anything we haven’t covered into the bit after the Positioning & Attachment segment, which is long.

I have said that the clients seem to be satisfied, but I know that in fact they would like more time. They want to cover topics that I can’t fit into my slot. Breastfeeding is too big a subject to do justice in two hours. I should do an activity that helps them to identify sources of support; this is usually the first one I drop when we start running over time. And as for problem-solving, I don’t even plan that in anymore, unless I’m lucky and I’ve got a rare three-hour class. Surely those are two things that people want to get out of the breastfeeding class?

In fact they don’t really know they need to think about support. And I do at least give out contact information, lists of helplines and drop-in groups. Do they absorb it? Do they even remember where the leaflet is, after they’ve had their babies? I tell them to stick it to the fridge, but I can’t make them – they get handed so many leaflets during the months of pregnancy that I don’t blame them at all for bunging them all in the recycling.

And we do cover problem solving as part of the discussion, but when it is woven into the general chit-chat, they don’t know we’ve done it. They can’t look back and remember a specific activity covering that subject, so they think it didn’t happen. Yet pain is one of the first things they mention when I ask what they know about breastfeeding, and we talk about what sort of pain you might experience, why, what it means, what you can do about it, and where you can get help. But you can’t please all of the people all of the time: last week’s feedback asked why we had to assume things would go wrong.

A year ago I was a little overwhelmed by the massive ignorance of the group about what life with a baby would be like. I knew that I was once in their shoes, but I felt daunted that my task was somehow to transcend the birth barrier and help them to get their heads round what to expect when you’re no longer expecting. I don’t feel that anymore. We have good discussions about it, and I try not to answer all their questions. I sometimes think that a good prop would be a ball of string and a pair of scissors.

My knowledge has grown so much since I started teaching, and my confidence, and the fluidity of my performance. It does feel like performing, and I love an appreciative audience. There are nights when they just don’t bounce, they don’t give it back to me, and that can be much more of a struggle. I know I still have a lot to learn. By the end of February, I will have completed the number of teaching hours that BFCs are normally expected to reach in five years. The most important thing I have learned in this time is how much I still have to learn.

I say more talking, but I mean more reading and writing – it just doesn’t sound as good. A little while ago we unearthed a packet of Letterland flashcards, inherited in a bag full of toys from someone somewhere [i.e. not something I would buy]. These proved reliably entertaining for quite some time, with the added bonus that the boy learned all his letters, upper and lower case. I don’t know if he does much with letters in preschool, but in the last few weeks he has suddenly exploded into reading and writing.

I secretly chuckle when we’re at Alice’s house and Bernard is trouncing Stan on the Speak&Spell.

I have taken him to the GP, who objected to my use of the term tic. They are not tics, because they’re not sudden movements. Nonetheless, I persisted, I am concerned about these involuntary movements, whatever speed they happen at. The GP admitted it was outside his remit and made a pediatric appointment for me, which is what I wanted. I hardly expected a prescription.

I spoke to his childminder and his teacher, both of whom say they have noticed rapid blinking. They school implemented a red book in which we all record our observations. In six weeks’ time, when we get to see the paediatrician, this is going to be useful; especially if the tics don’t show themselves during the appointment.

Of course I am worried. But I cannot spend the next six weeks operating at the height of anxiety about this, when perhaps it really is just something he will grow out of. How will that help? We will see the paediatrician, and something will be done about it.

In favour: I get to talk about knitting a lot, and knit a lot, and probably collaborate on some finishing off (we like to weave in each other’s ends, which sounds a bit kinky, but isn’t). Pete gets to talk about techie stuff. Bernard gets attention and company. We get to hear about Pix’s trip to Singapore and eat sausages. We get out of the house properly after days of being trapped by snow.

Against: while the snow may at this point be something we feel we can cope with, if more falls and we get stuck out there, that won’t be pretty. We don’t want to spend hours and hours getting home with the boy.

I say we are trapped by snow, but in truth we’ve all been out and about a little bit. Bernard gets put out every now and then to run around and fling snow at the garage door. Pete made it to the office on Friday. Yesterday I taught an antenatal class in a village hall on the other side of town, where the car park was inaccessible and there was hazardous ice around the doorway. It would just be nice to see real people and get a proper change of scenery. Although all the scenery is white.

We woke up to a world of quiet, partly because the snow blanket smothers any noise, and also of course because there is little traffic. The school is closed and it is not clear whether the trains are running. I took the day off, and Pete worked from home because I stamped my foot and said he couldn’t go in, in case he couldn’t get home.

I then gave Bernard a stern talking to about not disturbing daddy while he was working, at the end of which Pete got up and announced we were all going outside to build a snowman. Pete is very particular when it comes to snowmen, and today he has built a 7′ King of Snow. Every now and then he has to nip out and replace the mouth-stones. Down the road there is a Darth Vader, complete with fighting glow-stick [as Bernard calls light sabres], and there are 2.5 igloos in the street.

Before lunch, Bernard played outside with the other children with no parental supervision at all. It was a bit of a strange experience for us to sit and do some work without being pestered, and we did have to peer out of the window at him every few minutes. He was fine.

Now it is dark, the snow is still falling and school is closed again tomorrow. We’re not going anywhere.

60 projects does sound like rather a lot; well, more than one a week is a lot, isn’t it? In my defence, they are almost all very small items such as hats and mitts, because I prefer the instant gratification of a quick knit to slaving away over jumpers and blankets. Having said that, though, there were quite a number of baby blankets. This one, for Lisa’s new baby, was my favourite. Hopefully it will arrive in the post before she reads this!

I have been browsing Ravelry and trying to select my favourite item of the whole year, but it’s just so hard. I love my Ripley hat; the Cairn mitts I posted to my sister in Barcelona, which she never received; the rainbow/zig-zag striped baby blanket for my cousin; the old shale cowl for my mum, made from yarn purchased on our dirty weekend in Scarborough; Bernard’s bright-coloured entrelac scarf; my slanting shell stitch fingerless mitts; Pete’s set of black and grey themed mitts and hat (scarf to follow, actual fleece lined matching gloves purchased in M&S for yule), and of course Bernard’s hat with cat ears which I made for his halloween costume.

I have tried lots of new techniques, including fair isle (I’m pretty rubbish, tension goes all wrong), entrelac, and lots of lace knitting; but as yet no cables. Cables will be soon, though. I have purchased the necessary needles. And socks, too.

When do I find time to knit? On the train (I usually knit boobs on public transport, because they are small and portable. You can’t tell what they are). On the sofa in front of the telly, two or three nights a week. At the breastfeeding drop-in when no-one turns up. In the early morning when Bernard’s watching cBeebies. Any other time that I can get away with it. That’s why I usually have at least two projects on the go, some combination of the following: A portable project, a must-concentrate project, a needn’t-concentrate project, a large project that takes ages and needs other things to relieve the boredom.

Knitting fills the gaps, keeps my hands busy, helps me to relax without feeling like I’m wasting precious time. And it is so very satisfying, for an unartistic and uncreative person such as myself, to produce such pleasing finished items. I enjoy knitting things for other people (not so much when they get stuffed in the back of a drawer and never worn – I think I would rather people said no thank you, so I could keep the things). When I’m knitting for other people, I think about them. It’s nice. I also enjoy knitting for myself, but fear I do that rather too much. How many pairs of fingerless mitts does a girl really need?

A short walk to the train station later, and we discover that there are no trains. Another short walk back to the house, and distribute the party evenly between two cars (sorry, been reading a lot of knitting patterns). The roads are surprisingly quiet, and we don’t slow down until we reach the queue for the car park.

By this time we need some lunch, and drag everyone into our new favourite, Las Iguanas. BryTom had an enormous Hilton Hotel breakfast so they sip coke and watch us eat, until we allow them to leave. Then MIL earns major brownie points by offering to childmind while Pete and I hit the shops. We wolf down our chimichangas, and leave Bernard doggedly munching his way through sauce, chips and a burger (in that order). Sometimes restaurant food gets him that way; the other weekend he ate an entire pizza. It took about an hour and a half to complete.

Which, coincidentally, is the same amount of time that Pete and I have to Do the Sales, so we split up to maximise our coverage. My list says: black trousers, 2/3 tops, knitted dress. Zara, Fat Face, East, Monsoon, back to Zara, and I have accomplished exactly that. Pete’s list says: pyjama trousers. We power-walk to the rendezvous, where I discover that Zara left the security tag on. I leave them with their post-shopping beers and zip back, accidentally stopping in House of Fraser to buy another dress on the way back.

Having limited time and opportunity to shop works amazingly well for me. If I cannot afford to dither, then I don’t dither. I scan for size/colour, and if I like it I buy it. When I have all the things on my list, I stop (except in the case of accidents).

The next day, we return for the start of the sales in John Lewis and M&S, because we needed slippers and yarn. I have only a vague list of required yarns but I think 17 skeins later that I have probably got it covered.

When Pete went off to work on the 24th, we set about tidying the house and starting to prepare food. Bernard spent a little time playing out in the snow in front of the house, and then came in to help out with the cranberry and mincemeat baklava. The MIL arrived mid-morning and was most irked to find that there was nothing left for her to do.

Our street was an ungritted ice-rink, so I was glad when Pete’s sister and her boyfriend (collectively known as BryTom) arrived. Everyone was instructed to deliver their present cache directly to the garage, out of sight of Small Boy’s eyes. Since it was under 5 degrees in there, that’s where Mr Pepperdine the Turkey spent the night as well.

And then, as if Bernard wasn’t excited enough, Daddy arrived home and got the tree out of the attic. The real/fake tree argument is a non-starter for us, as Pete bought the plastic tree before we lived together and it still looks sufficiently tree-ish. The team decorated the tree, and then BryTom rearranged every single piece of lametta until she was happy with it. I have no idea how long we have had that stuff, but it keeps on coming back.

Finally, my dad arrived, Bernard had his tea and went to bed, and we arranged the presents under the tea, had a curry, and argued good-naturedly about whether or not the wine was corked.

Bernard woke around 5:30 and we stalled him until 6am, when Pete snuck downstairs to put the lights on. There were many fabulous moments in the day, but watching the Boy come down the stairs with an expression of wonder at the colourful, MASSIVE pile of presents beneath the glittering tree, had to be the best. And for a little while, it was just the three of us.

By the time the others arrived from their hotels, Mr Pepperdine was in the oven and there was still an impressive quantity of wrapped items under the tree. Fortunately Bernard still likes to play with everything very thoroughly before moving on to the next. He is also as deeply impressed by a parcel of socks as he is by vast quantities of playdough. In fact, the most absorbing toy seems to have been a second-hand puzzle-game that I got in the Nearly new Sale back in September. It has six pieces missing, and yet it has received more attention than any of the other toys. Once again, Grampy’s elaborate and OTT gift has not had much impact yet. But as soon as it’s charged up, I’m sure the orange plastic quad-bike will be a big hit.

Lunch was planned for 1pm, and as I had done so much preparation the day before, I only spent the last hour hovering in and out of the kitchen, and managed to get it on the table bang on time. Mr Pepperdine was cooked perfectly, dressed in a lattice of streaky bacon, and accompanied by chipolatas, stuffing balls, red cabbage stewed in port and redcurrant jelly, baked apples stuffed with poached cranberries, brussel sprouts with chestnuts, roast parsnips, roast potatoes, mashed carrots, bread sauce and gravy. We ate in the conservatory, where we had pushed two dining tables together and draped them in red fabric. Everyone had a candle to celebrate the return of the light (although I don’t think this was explicitly mentioned) and a cracker hand-made by BryTom.

The afternoon is a blur of presents and paper. Someone must have washed up at some point, and I took a shift on the Breastfeeding Line at 5pm, but there were no calls so I was able to watch The Gruffalo as well. The whole day went so smoothly, most of the presents were good, no-one got stressed out at any point, and Bernard behaved himself beautifully. I might call that the best Yule ever, and of course the first one that was officially not known as Christmas.

But now all seems to be clear. He is lying on the floor doing an alphabet jigsaw, and I need to go and get dressed. There is a long list of chores for today, and we have to get to the library before 1. Bernard says it must be Christmas soon because there is snow. I say that some people call it Christmas, but we call it Yule. He says they’re the same thing.

Wet coats hats scarves gloves hanging up in the garage, heating on, faces and hair dried. The washing machine won’t fill: either the inlet is frozen or the machine is kaput. Secretly I hope for a new washing machine, although this is the worst possible time to need one, as we are all about to run out of pants.