Like Clair, I am not being put off by a lack of a theme. Today: random food witterings. Since my gorgeous weekend at Mamaheaven, I have been thinking about improving our diet – since having Jenny we have slipped rather into the fishfingers and oven chips mode; she’s 17 months now and the excuse doesn’t really cut it any more. After scoffing all the chocolate, to get it out of the way, I have been sprouting seeds on the windowsill in a special seed-sprouty jar, and adding spirulina to random fruit smoothies. I made spelt pastry! (All of which is aided by my campaign to use up things from the cupboard, pre-move.) I took some books from the library, most useful of which has been the Accidental Vegetarian, from which I have tried 4 or 5 recipes so far. Just this morning I discovered, serendipitously, that it is national vegetarian week: coincidentally, I haven’t cooked meat since last Thursday.

So far this week: gnocchi with rosemary ragu (7/10 – would have been better with a bit of bacon); fried halloumi with vinaigrette, brown rice and steamed greens (8/10); Italian bean stew (8/10); blueberry pancakes, which oddly contained cottage cheese (8/10). Scores mine as I suspect my carnivorous family might score slightly lower – though the kids really loved the halloumi and they always like a beany stew. I am going to make aubergine chilli tonight then head to yoga…

You must tell the mums! Tell them! I was urged by our oh-so-hippy ex-GP. (He now runs the village farmers’ market and is gung-ho about unpasteurised milk and passionate about the village pig project.) I’m not entirely certain which mums he means, given that surely anybody who was interested would be quite capable of googling – these days there is an enormous array of websites dedicated to the black art of what I refuse to call babywearing – or approaching me on the street; an event that occurs about once every 3 weeks. (In between I am approached by elderly people who wish I would carry them.)

With hindsight, I should have started selling baby slings when M was tiny: if only a fraction of the people who enquired actually went on to buy one from me I’d still be well ahead. There just weren’t the options then; these days there are millions of different sling designs and manufacturers and websites. Unlike some dedicated shoppers, I only have four slings, and one other passed briefly through my hands before being sold on. The one in this photo was our first; bought in Japan (and look, here is baby Maggie in it), it is an Israeli-design stretchy wrap. A sling of some sort was essential in Tokyo, where subway stations often had two or three flights of stairs and no lift (and I learnt from bitter experience that you could stand at the bottom of a flight of stairs looking plaintively at your buggy for a really long time before anybody offered to help.) It’s just about 6 metres of black jersey with a pocket at the front and rings to fasten the ends together. Cameron’s sling of choice, as it is fast and easy to put on; my favourite for a tiny baby. The stretch means you can put the carrier on first then put the baby in – so great for a newborn who might pop up and down over the course of a day – but also makes it less supportive so it isn’t so good once baby is heavy.

My current favourite for Jenny is a didymos, a woven wrap (no photos of this one yet but it is stylishly black and silver). I wrap it in almost the same way as the stretchy, but around the baby as it doesn’t stretch to accommodate. I like it very much but wish it too had rings to fasten as I end up with a bulky knot at the back when I tie it.

Number three is a maya wrap, which I have yet to put Jenny in. I did use it for a newborn Tamsin but it really comes into its own for older babies and younger toddlers; I keep it in the back of the car, or carry it if we go for a walk, as it is so easy to just pop them in and out. I dislike the one-shoulderedness of it and am aware you should swap sides but like my handbag only really feel happy with it over the right side.

I’ve just come to number four and realised with a blush that actually we seem to have five. Blame baby brain even if it no longer officially exists. My fourth style of sling is a meitai, basically a square of fabric with four strap attached to the four corners (you can get meitais with wrap-style straps, padded straps, unpadded straps, head rests, rain covers… mine is just basic.) It’s pretty, in pink spotty satin, and I like it best to put babies on my back. In principle one can wrap onto one’s back but I don’t find it that comfortable; the meitai just feels right. (This is Tamsin again.)

(Lastly, I have a second woven wrap; it’s a turquoise and silver gauze which is supposedly cool for summer but was fundamentally bought because it is pretty. The only photo I have of this one – the curse of being the family photographer – is appallingly hippy.)

OK so I haven’t quite been here as much as I intended.  Part two of our hol has not yet appeared. Today: a new term, a new school year. And boy are we back to normal: Mag loved school of course, despite a small wibble when we went in to her new classroom, saying goodbye to Ruby (different class this year) and not knowing where her drawer was. But apparently her new school shoes were brilliant. Tamsin and I zipped into town on the bus to visit the market for 2 kg of plums – I have an unexplained urge to make wine – and some damsons for gin, then she went off to preschool. Cameron has gone to Italy via London (he is showing some press people round Ferrari, how horrible for him) and I am home alone in the rain with a short deadline. And actually rather enjoying being on my own for the first time since July!

I haven’t set foot on the allotment since being kicked off: am going to have to stop being sad and embarrassed and get myself down there. There’s a sandpit and two raised beds (and some lovely veg, and a rhubarb crown that I know they have been coveting) that I will not leave for the next person. It’s raining though; did I mention that?

I’ve been reading…not that I am ever without a book, but I’ve been getting through them at a better rate (we’ll see what happens now it is term-time again). One of my reads was not on the label, an interesting book in the same vein as tescopoly or fast food nation. It wasn’t full of surprises but has reinforced a lot of the things I was trying to do anyway – so I am back baking bread, which had slipped over the holidays (and early pregnancy too, don’t forget – a pretty damn good excuse if you ask me) and stepping back from the meat-centric diet we had drifted towards. (This is complicated by Tamsin being almost exclusively carnivorous.) I have dug out my excellent river cottage bread book and today attempted english muffins (that’s them in the picture); bagels are next on the hit list. I am unsure about prawns, the farmed fish/wild fish thing continues to confuse me, but I feel quietly smug (and lucky) to have an organic farm shop in the next village that competes with the supermarkets price-wise and stocks about 95% of things I want.

I bought Green Parent magazine today, for the first time (I think – I buy magazines at random and might have had it once before, a long time ago). The title looks like it might be my sort of thing, though I knew deep down I probably wasn’t going to like it – but it was a craft issue and Maggie and I are getting quite into craft. After a fashion, given that I have no skill, but we enjoy trying. We made salt dough autumn leaves last month! (Which are still half-finished and on the side in the kitchen: maybe we’ll get them done for next autumn.) I was right – I don’t like it much: it is smug. I could manage it assuming we were home-schooling anti-vaxers, because the clue is there in the title. I probably don’t need an article written in Very Simple Words about how to be friends with normals (!) without offending them, poor ignorant creatures. What I am mostly irritated about is the fact that I am now going to have to write to them: one of their recipes is for coconut ice (this in a magazine that suggests one might not be friends with somebody who eats sausages*). Coconut ice made with condensed milk. I need explain no further to my dedicated reader who hangs on my every word, but for those of you who were perhaps not paying such close attention, I have tried (failed) previously to source condensed milk that is not made by (boo, hiss) Nestle. It just can’t be done. Now, I looooooove condensed milk: it is one of the few products that makes me snap schminciples and buy anyway (the other two being the kitkat and the rolo). But a magazine that is oh-so-ethical such as this should really not be pushing it, don’t you think? I imagine a large proportion of their readership will be boycotting. Must write a letter.

Speaking of bandwagon-jumping crafts, I fear I might be gearing up to knit something. I’ve been holding out for ages simply because everybody in the entire world has taken up knitting. (I knitted a cushion cover when we were in Japan but that is the only thing I have done in the nearly 20 years since I was a girl guide knitting teddy bears.)  I have recently acquired my granny’s cast-off** needles, a big bag of old wool, and today in Oxfam a book of basic knitting techniques fell into my hands.Help!

*I have no idea. Am insufficiently green, clearly.
**Geddit? Ha ha ha.

And really quite excited about our holiday. Not entirely sure why (except it is a long time since I had one) and hoping very hard that this weather holds. While the rest of you have had stair-rods along with Bill-n-Kate, Cheshire has had high summer. Like we used to have when we were children: day after day of unrelenting sunshine (presumably because I have invested in a rainwater butt). Cameron, in a really dramatically underhand bid to avoid doing any packing at all, has swanned off to Houston for the week. Maggie is being super-whingy-whiney (I alternate between blaming two grandparental visits in quick succession – she often gets a bit strange afterwards – and daddy being away. Or is she a bit poorly, who knows. Or the heat. Or just four.) Tamsin is interminably teething, and we are still overrun with critters of all description.

Slugs, check. Spiders, check. Mice – now in the kitchen cupboards so b*ll*cks to being humane, I’ve been out for proper traps this morning. Blackbird flying round the morning room battering against the windows, check. Next-door’s dog coming and depositing, um, deposits on our lawn. Check. Until I put a note through her door* yesterday and now she has blocked the hole in the fence (hooray). Unfortunately while blocking it she investigated what he was barking at and found a rat in the hedge (did you say you had a compost bin because perhaps that is attracting them). Have purchased larger traps to go with the small mousey ones: intend to spend the rest of the week before we go away disposing of rodent corpses. Unceremoniously.

Today I bought new nappies. Not terribly momentous, I agree, but the old ones had been in near-constant use for 4 years and were looking a little sad. (How much money I have saved. Smug, moi?!) The tipping point came when I realised T was either holding them up with her hands or giving up and taking them off altogether – the elastic had finally given up the ghost and, now we have sunshine glorious sunshine and she is no longer in a pop-up vest, they were feeling the effects of gravity. Rainbow bots, purchased all those long years ago, are no longer in production (mine are no longer beautiful icecream colours like those in the picture but a kind of nondescript grey), so I went along to see Lizzie, my local nappy dealer. I knew one of her neighbours so we started with a bit of a gossip (Chester is like that) then I came away with two discounted discontinued end-of-line bamboozles (slim-fitting, very absorbant, take forever to dry, she says). Apparently I am alone in my love of a coloured nappy as the lovely bright yellow and purple are no longer to be manufactured (all these people who want boring white nappies have not fully considered staining, I suspect). Four fluffles (bulky but fast-drying and oh my goodness as soft as a cloud: I’d like to cuddle one if that wasn’t a bit weird. White. Nippa fastening rather than velcro, which will take a bit of getting used to), also discontinued for reasons unknown as they are enormously popular. Four state-of-the-art flexitots (mid-bulkiness; fit like a disposable ie slim round the waist baggy underneath, which is a bit peculiar but ok). They have velour inners! I’d wear one myself (if, you know, I wasn’t toilet trained. Which I am.) Some people become nappy junkies and like to try every sort; others (like me) find ones they like then just stick with them and stop looking – so no more nappy chat, maybe ever.

*A very polite note, and it is all quite amicable. We like our neighbours. Apart from her horribly yappy dogs that bark all the sodding time when she is at work (but have very cute puppies). And the other side has a horrible barky dog that scares even me never mind Maggie (Tamsin doesn’t bat an eyelid) and whose “deposits” remain on the nice new patio for an unseemly length of time, making hanging out my washing really unpleasantly smelly.

…and jolly pleased with my new sandals I am too. Despite the cynics on Downsizer who claimed it was all a sop to the middle classes: I needed new sandals anyway, my Birkis having done 4 summers’ hard labour and really being fit for no more than hanging out the washing. So I sent off a pair of old jeans, a cheque for 45 quid, and got these lovelies back. And I have to tell you that their claim to be the most comfortable sandals you will ever wear is not at all exaggerated.

The only thing I should have thought about beforehand is the blue-denim thing: OK if you are *not* wearing blue-denim jeans with your sandals but a bit odd-looking if you are. And I do, about 30 days each month. So I am on the lookout in charity shops for some old red jeans I can have converted. How cool will they be?!

http://www.recycleyourjeans.com/