Baby J is 6 months old. Six months! (And some weeks: it takes a good fortnight to get a post written these days.) And I find I am yet to write her birth story, which is not fair as I did Maggie‘s and Tamsin‘s), and somehow I haven’t written a thing here since April. Pesky facebook. She’s grand though: she sits, she moves around though not forwards yet, she is most enthusiastic about food and all she wants, really, is for somebody to take some notice and pay her some attention. Maggie and Tamsin adore her (though I am prepared for this to change when she starts properly moving and getting in the way).

(Birth story hidden behind the break for those of a delicate constitution – easier to write than the others as I have actually been treated like a grown up – that’s lovely independent midwives for you – and been allowed a copy of my notes)

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Eek! April! Easter! Spring! And no seeds sown yet!

To be fair it is only just spring isn’t it; I don’t think either I or the seeds have been much in the mood before now (you proper gardener types: have you been out there in your fleeces since February?).

After last year’s allotment debacle I find myself with just two raised beds (and pots, there is always pots*). I made Cameron fill the beds last week, and today with sun shining and girls whinging irritatingly playing happily in the background, I have made a start. The use of raised beds rather than acres and acres of lovely land has in practice ruled out potatoes and probably beans, although I have not completely rejected the idea of a bamboo wigwam occupying half of one of the beds and/or climbing beans over the playhouse. Today I have sown direct beetroot**, peas, salad, chrysanth greens and carrots, and tiny modules with aubergines, cucumber, tomatoes, kale, PSB and shiso. I have started some parsnips on damp kitchen roll and also plan to grow squashes of some sort, courgettes, herbs, leeks and, um, I can’t remember what else. Have I missed anything essential?

Of course, if we move I will lose them all. But no bugger seems to want to come and look around at the moment, and I can hardly leave the beds all empty to grow weeds (plus I enjoy sowing and growing for its own sake not just the end result). (Which is fortunate, really.)

*Is always pots? Are always pots?
**No, nobody does, much. But it is compulsory I understand.

This is a post for Karen’s pimp my menu project

Yes yes, roast chicken. Not a pimped menu, but a staple; I love a meal that makes three (at least: roast on the Sunday cold-with-veg* on Monday, sandwiches for lunch and I always but always make stock; just call me Martha). However, I decided to tart it up a bit this weekend. Not a total success in that the children were highly suspicious of the spicey bit, even though I omitted chilli of any description, and Tamsin doesn’t like couscous this week, but there was plenty of unmucked-about-with chicken meat to satisfy their carnivorous tendancies – I have odd children – and broccoli on the side is always safe. And followed with a rice pud so there weren’t too many complaints overall.

Anyway. I took one chicken, defrosted rapidly in the sink because I forgot until I was already in bed on Saturday and couldn’t persuade myself to do the sensible thing and go back down to get it. I put a halved lemon inside and poured olive oil all over then coated the skin in a crushed-up mixture of sesame, coriander and cumin seeds, salt, pepper, and orange zest. It’s a bit of a Jamie recipe done from memory (so possibly little resembles his). In the oven at 200C to roast in a normal fashion. An hour before it was due to come out, added a cut-up red pepper and a couple of quartered red onions to the tin.

When it was ready I hoiked out the chicken, poured off most of the fat and squeezed the lemon bits into the tin. I added about 300 ml water and brought it all to the boil then poured it into a saucepan to which I added 250 g couscous, some chopped dried apricots and cranberries, the chopped-up onion and pepper, some salt and a bit of crushed coriander seed. 5 mins with the lid on over a very low flame, and bob’s your uncle.

*Sadly never nice bubble-and-squeak-type veg because, regardless of how many roast potatoes I make, we never fail to eat all but one.

This is a post for Karen’s pimp my menu project
Cameron has been away this week, so I am excused cooking beyond that of the basic fishfingers and chips variety necessary to sustain life. Thus, this week I give you biscuits with a slight smirk in Karen’s direction as she rolls her eyes at those missing the point.

The recipe was on the back of the green and black’s bar I scoffed in a fit of low blood sugar one afternoon at 4 (secretly in the kitchen, having made the children have fruit). They are a bit fall-aparty and the chocolate chips are unnecessary and frankly not that nice (I used plain, of which I am not fond;  milk might be a different matter). The biscuit part is very nice though. As follows :-

Prepare shortbreads 1 and 2 as below; rest them in the fridge for half an hour. Roll them into rectangles approx 1 cm thick and put s/bread 2 on top of s/bread 1. Scatter 100g chopped chocolate over the top (I really wouldn’t bother) then, using greaseproof paper to support it, roll them together like a swiss roll. Squish and squeeze with your hands into a sausage about 22cm long* then slice with a sharp knife into 1-cm-thick rounds. Bake at 150C for 25 minutes; cool on a rack**.

Shortbread 1: 150 g plain flour, 1/2 tsp salt, 50 g caster sugar, 125g unsalted butter. Mix in mixer until a dough.
Shortbread 2: 125 g plain flour, 25g cocoa, 1/2 tsp salt, 50 g caster sugar, 125g unsalted butter. Mix in mixer until a dough.

*This is where the sums go a bit wonky as 22 cm divided into 1 cm slices will clearly make 22 biscuits; the recipe says “makes 14”. I got 18.

**If you do this immediately, not only will they completely fall apart, the melted chocolate swirl drips out and welds the bisctuis to the rack. I suggest cooling on the greaseproof paper.

This is a post for Karen’s pimp my menu project

Ok, so I wasn’t going to include this because the spices came out of a packet, which felt like cheating, but then Karen said it could be anything you don’t usually cook, thus granting me permission to include all sorts of readymade jars and microwave meals. Maybe not entirely within the spirit of the thing, but hey. I might tell you all about an asda pizza or something next week.

Last summer, I hosted a “Jamie at home” party, at home*. It left me with several packets of spices in the cupboard, each nicely wrapped in cardboard with a shopping list and instructions. The chicken one was lovely but they are very spicy, and my children do not eat anything spicy (which is the main reason they – the mixes, not the children – have been in the cupboard for so long; I am not somebody who chooses to cook two separate meals very often.) That said, Saturday night is curry night so I decided to try the lamb rogan josh. This cooking from a packet malarky is easy and fun! Marinate lamb in a mixture of brown spices and yogurt; use food processor to blitz onions and peppers, cook with rest of brown spices; add lamb, simmer. Put yellow spices and rice in rice cooker.

Unfortunately it looked like nothing so much as cat sick with yellow rice. Eaten with closed eyes, it was surprisingly tasty. Could have done with some veg.

*without Jamie.

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.)

Busy busy. Mum came to look after us for a fortnight, which was lovely: so nice to have that extra pair of hands to pass the baby to, or to peel potatoes, or colour with Tamsin, or do Maggie’s homework. (I mean, of course, help M with her homework.) And now she has gone and we are working out how to manage three children two grownups; it seems the way to manage is mostly to do no housework beyond the absolute essential* and to live in a midden. So naturally I have upped the ante by choosing this week to put the house on the market. Any buyers out there who can see past the toys and clutter and non-cream walls and distinct lack of immaculacy?

We have a new car, so can all leave the house simultaneously and not in convoy. It is a Toyota so may well be recalled for weirdy accelerator issues:  it will have to go back anyway as they have not fitted the reverse parky beepy things that we requested. Not sure if it is the fault of the lease company or Toyota; frankly I don’t much care as long as it is resolved before I reverse into something. Cameron sold his at the weekend and is now driving my old one, muttering under his breath about the yogurt and crumbs and mud and general unpleasantness of it: he tried to get it valeted on Sunday but was turned away from two places. We are not sure if they were scared by the state of it or just about to close.

Jenny** is growing and growing and I know this is a good thing and what babies are supposed to do yet couldn’t help feeling sad as I realised I had to stop cramming her little feet into newborn-sized babygros and get out the next size. It is a novelty for me to have a big baby (she’s not huge, just biggish) after the other two tots, and she is such a happy content sweet thing with bright eyes and a double chin. Maggie is reading, properly – just discovering the Secret Seven and really not that interested in being read to or even in reading out loud but just wants to be left in peace with her nose stuck in. Just like her mum. She’s a sensitive soul who was upset when Granny went home. Tamsin is, well, three, and didn’t give a monkeys. Very three. She’s enjoying preschool but still refuses to speak there (but will whisper, with some sort of 3-year-old logic) and is great at jigsaws -oh, and she has started ballet lessons which she loves.

* Essential = one hot meal a day, clean plates to eat it from, clean clothes.
**Links are to photos

All sorts of lapsed bloggers have been crawling out from the woodwork and behind stones this Christmas period. I feel inspired to join. If anybody out there isn’t on FB/my text list/the grapevine and is thus unaware, baby Jenny joined us on December 20th (just: 1.11 am). I may be a biased and rose-tinted mum – and it may be early days – but she’s a pretty perfect baby and her big sisters are thrilled. More photos can be found here, including one of M&T dragged from their beds to meet the new arrival, and for those of you who enjoy such entertainment her birth story will follow just as soon as I can bear to put her down for long enough (and as soon as I find time without a babe-in-arms that isn’t immediately claimed by another child or some essential household task. Or sleep.) All I will say for now is that independent midwives rock, and are worth every single penny.

Her first couple of days of life were spent on the sofa snoozing and feeding (she is a champ and has gained a lb already, at 10 days old) and generally getting over the whole pushing out a baby at way past one’s bedtime thing (didn’t get to bed until after 3 the night she arrived). My favourite event was surprising Sara, in whose house we had been at 5 pm on Saturday (no baby): her face was a picture when she walked into our living room at 10 am on Sunday to find a whole new human being had arrived overnight! On day 3, we finally managed to put up the Christmas tree and were visited by a different midwife; this one had wondered the day before J arrived if it would be worth trying a wee bit of homeopathy: we had discussed whether it would work if you didn’t believe in it. She maintains it clearly does (I think she’d have arrived regardless). Day 4 my milk arrived – I need say no more for anybody who has been through it – as did my parents.

A pleasant if necessarily quiet Christmas: mum and dad came and cooked goose and trimmings (and now they have gone I can put selected leftovers in the bin but shh don’t tell!) and occupied M & T with games and crafts. They (the girls) had clearly absorbed all the propaganda about santa not coming if one didn’t go straight to sleep: when I went up to tuck them in and fill their stockings, I found two girls lying perfectly straight under completely undisturbed duvets, clearly neither of whom had twitched a single muscle since bedtime. Both slept until 745 which was quite a present for us, too. [Aside: at a week old I find it hard to evaluate whether J is “good”, but I am getting a lot more sleep now than when I was pregnant, which probably means she is. I was asked today whether she was sleeping through, which struck me as a bit nuts.]

J and I had our first outing yesterday – her first ever trip outside the house, my first venture beyond the garden shed for 10 days. Lovely to get walking not waddling and I so enjoyed getting the baby sling back out. Today was busy with the health visitor (a profession of which I have not been given cause to revise my opinion), a trip to the hospital for J’s hearing test (all clear) and a new tumbledryer as mine picked the perfect time to break down. J has experienced three short car rides so far and has screamed through them all which does not bode well for next week when we must go to Surrey.

Fry a chopped onion and some garlic (I used 3 cloves, peeled but not chopped) in some olive oil until they are starting to look quite brown and caramelisedy (it is too a word).  Add about 1/2 tsp ground cumin, 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon and 1/3 tsp flaked dried chilli; stir about a bit then pour in about 500 ml nice chicken stick (home made for even more smugness). Add 1 1/2 minute but home-grown butternut squashes, diced (or, I don’t know, about half of a normal shop-sized one), and simmer with the lid on until that goes soft and, ahem, squashy. Let it cool a bit then blitz to a gorgeous smooth thick soup.  Scoff the lot then lie groaning on the sofa until it is time to get the children (who wouldn’t have appreciated it anyway).

So, Cameron spent 2 weeks in Switzerland on a course. (No I have no idea, you’d have to ask him.) Fortunately we had had enough notice of this one that I had my parents booked for the first week – always good to have extra pairs of hands for the small fee of meals and coffees out; Dad even pickaxed-up two patches of very hard lawn, which now very much resemble freshly dug graves, for me to assemble my raised beds, ex-allotment (boo hiss), next spring.

The middle weekend was spent with about 20-odd people (friends and friends-of-friends) at the very lovely park hall; highly recommended if you need somewhere to accommodate so many people in the middle of nowhere, want a small pebbly bay within walking distance and a lovely sandy beach a 10-minute drive, don’t mind having no phone reception and fancy fresh air and silence. The girls had a whale of a time, I got loads of sleep, what more could we have wanted?

The second week actually passed surprisingly peacefully, despite me having a  looming deadline (which was supposed to be my last as I have awarded myself some maternity leave). Oh, and we just won’t mention me locking the keys (car and house) into the car boot and spending a good 3 hours organising and then waiting for my rescue service. If I hadn’t been quite so pregnant, and hadn’t had 2 small children to watch me, and had thought of it (!), I could have probably managed to get up onto the roof and in through the bathroom window. It wouldn’t have been elegant.

Friday morning, Cameron had to get a train right across Switzerland to catch a plane: this got him home a mere half-hour later than anticipated which allowed us an overlap of approximately 25 minutes (I wrote a briefing note) before it was my turn to go! On the train to London to meet Pewari and attend TAM.

Great weekend. Great. Even though I am truly abysmal as a modern woman and missed my children (we are all supposed to be champing at the bit to get away for some Me Time.) All the speakers were exceptional, without, um, exception; a couple of the comedians on the Saturday night were not entirely my thing but given that we were at the conference centre from 8 am and didn’t get back to the hotel until 1130, I was feeling quite jaded by then anyway. My quote of the conference goes to Glenn Hill (son of the Cottingley Fairies photographer) who described people of religion as “human goslings”, imprinting on the first thing they are told. In context it was quite brilliant. My heart was warmed by the delegates’ reaction to Simon Singh announcing his wife was expecting their first baby: proof positive that sceptics are not cynics.

In no particular order, my impressions were as follows: great shoes, wacky slogan T-shirts, i-phones, twitter. Geeky yet pleasant and very friendly. How can they expect you to eat sausage and mash without a knife (and why no ketchup?). Dehydration. Bad coffee; good choice of teas. “Breakfast” does not equal coffee and a pastry in my book. Richard Wiseman hilarious.

Maggie asked Cameron on Saturday whether I would be home this week. Apparently if I was (I am, obviously) we would “be like a proper family”. Way to layer the guilt, child. May I just point out that the last time I went away overnight leaving Cameron to do childcare, I was expecting Tamsin?