April 2009 - Chapter 5 - The one where no-one is allowed to feel guilty (except about all the chocolate...)

[Guimauve]

There will be chocolate fines for the guilty!

You can preach to me, WFH! I'm preparing a list of questions about the practicalities of BLW in your experience ! Well, preparing it in my head, anyway, which means I'll forget them all.
So if I ask them as they occur instead:
Do you use (unsalted) butter for bread/ toast, or some kind of marg?
What does LO eat if you have a takeaway? Or do you never have takeaway? We have one once a month as a pay-day treat, but I can't imagine your average Chinese/ Indian/ Pizza/ KFC is awfully suitable!

Ooh, Ginger (right, that's that settled, am shortening it to Ginger), am off to neb at you on FB now. I thought you said once you were neither Sarah nor ginger. Baby brain again.

I think that's another reason why I am not fighting to go out; from my memories of DS1, I got back to such a fraught DH and a screamy baby that it didn't seem worth it.
But maybe if you do it regularly it gets easier, as they adapt...?

Wow this thread has moved on. Today I enjoyed chocolate biscuits, rum truffles and raspberry syllabub as part of a healthy diet. It's just that I mostly forgot to eat the healthy diet part.

I had loads to say but at this moment, have forgotten it all.

Puzzle love your snappy catchup

Boff how did DS's fragrant first day go?

Auld you recipe scrounger you

Tigga well done to your little man about the poorly leg.

Gui, come on admit it, you actually are me aren't you? My DH was terribly het up about this very thing, wanting to feed the baby. It's a man thing, that they want to solve the problem. Oddly enough, since he has had the option of wielding a spoon, he prefers to eat his dinner while it's hot, and will even opt to cook over feeding Edmund. He is however bonding brilliantly with E without any of that tedious feeding (or nappy changing ) effort. He can play peekaboo with him till he freaks out (E that is, not DH) and we are both just generally feeling the Edmund love at the moment. I don't know what all that waffle was acctually meant to say or anything. Oh I should point out that DH is great and isn't really shirking any of his responsibilities (though I do have to watch him as he was raised in a very traditional home - FIL didn't know where the cutlery drawer was in his own house when I met DH)

Bicnod most fruit and veg are fine to slowly introduce at this stage - avoid berry fruits, kiwi and citrus as they can be allergenic. You have to be careful with baby porridge because oats have gluten in (not a lot admittedly) which you're supposed to delay till after six months. Some baby porridges are actually just flavoured baby rice, which personally I find bizarrely yummy.

Auld I think the cereal to put in baby's bottles would be the same thing as baby rice, judging by the instructions on my German baby spelt porridge which Edmund won't touch. It seems that on the Continent it's still acceptable to put cereal in bottles, despite the fact it's a stoning offence here.

DH has pointedly taken E up to bed so I should stop warbling on and go too.

EdmundWillHaveAProperBedtimeRoutineAfterHisOpsOutOfTheWayMrsG

Have looked at FB.
You do indeed look ginger. I think I'd only seen the B&W photo which may or may not be you.

Ladies, shamlessly stolen from another thread but this is why Sam will be an only child.

StillLaughingTiggaxx

"The first time the word scone is found in print is in a translation of The Aeneid in 1513. The word may be derived from Dutch, schoonbrot, or German, schonbrot, meaning 'fine bread'; alternatively it could be from the Gaelic, sgon, meaning 'large mouthful'.

There is one school of thought that says the cake takes its name from Scone, the site of a long-gone Abbey where the kings of Scotland were crowned.

There is no right way to say the word. Some people say scone to rhyme with stone; others, including Theodora Fitzgibbon in her book, Traditional Scottish Cookery, say it should be pronounced scon to rhyme with gone."

And that's from The Internet, so it must be true

However you say it, I'll keep having mine sassenach-style (though actually, I wouldn't bother with butter if I had jam and cream, but then I have jam on toast without butter)!!!

Thanks mrsgboring. Might have another look at the baby cereal if it's like baby rice. Could I mix some with EBM and spoon feed it, then?

Get off those soap boxes, ladies, I am not planning to do this yet! Just exploring possibilities.

On the Continent (well in France), not only is it acceptable to put cereal in bottles, but kids aged 6 still have bottles of milk (sometimes with Nesquick in) for breakfast/goûter/bedtime drink. In the UK I think you'd not only be stoned for that, your mangled body would be exhibited in a public place for people to point at and shake their heads knowingly and sadly.

Can you tell I have a pile of ironing to do and am putting it off? Hence the random and excessive posting. It's past 11pm...must do it now.
Bonne nuit, mesdames!

Further evidence that I am MrsG:

My FIL also probably didn't know where the cutlery draw was. When MIL was alive, he'd say to her after dinner 'I'll take my coffee in the drawing room', and off he'd go. No help clearing table or washing up, nothing. I was always secretly fuming!

(NB - 'the drawing room was what most of us would call the sitting room or living room, they're not that posh!)

I love idea of a goûter! I do, in fact, have one most afternoons!

Ds1 still has a bottle of milk first thing in the morning

And why not, I say.

I remember my French friends' mothers giving us chocolate - not spread, just squares of chocolate - in white bread for our tea. Jolly healthy.

ahh but I say Scon but then apparently thats the posh way

Guimauve:

Unsalted butter, yes. Small children need a lot more fat in their diet than we do, so butter, cream, yogurt, all those things are lovely for babies.

Besides, marge is the work of the devil. We don't have it in the house.

As for takeaways - now DS1 is 3 he'll eat pizza and things like that, but in fact he still has his tea before we do (he eats at 5.30pm ish, DP doesn't get home till 7pm) so that issue has never come up.

Although the idea of BLW is that you don't cook special purees etc, there's no hard and fast rule that the baby has to eat with you if it's not convenient. DS1 has always had an early tea, except on Sundays when we all have roast dinner together at about six. Yum Yum Yum.

mrsgboring - I love 'feeling the Edmund love'!

I would be feeling the Orbit love, except he is keen to use me as a dummy at the moment due to sad teeth, and it's a bit tedious.

But he is super lovely and chuckly.

WFH, bread and chocolate was a very classic goûter.
We have it very occasionally, to DS1's delight, though I usually make him eat a piece of fruit before. From what I can see, I think it has been replaced in many cases by rubbishy biscuits, often featuring Disney characters, Dora the s*dding explorer, etc. TBH, the baguette element certainly isn't stunningly healthy, though it's better than lots of British white bread, but if you use good quality chocolate, I think probably it's not as bad for you as lots of the processed stuff that kids now eat.

Loving Orbit's sad teeth, BTW!

DH is snoring so badly I can't sleep. 1:20am: I have to get up in less than five and a half hours.

DS1 goes back to school tomorrow, to moyenne section. His class is mixed level and has 6 moyenne section kids and 18 grande section ones, and the teacher (who seems fab) is going to work on the environment and ecology with them (they are between 4 and 6 yrs old, BTW), with the high point being a stay of several nights in an ecologically friendly gîte somewhere at the end of the year. I am pathetically wobbly at the idea of my little boy spending several nights away at the age of 5. AIBU?

Am spending my sleepless night trying to plan a trip to Scotland over half term.
Does anyone know of a good place I could stay with DS1 and Alex (gulp!) near Stansted? I'd need to be at Stansted at 7:15am for a flight out to Marseille.
TIA

WFH.net.org.uk - As I thought. I may purchase a butter dish. Having room temp butter around is dangerous. I bought some lovely beurre d'Isigny once, and it lasted an indecently short amount of time, although it was deliciously salted. I haven't dared to get any since! I get through about 1kg butter/ month with baked goods . I'm inclined to believe you about marg being the work of the devil. Nice, natural, unprocessed butter, that's the way forwards.

I am going to get sooooo fat with a fridge full of full-fat milk (yum yum yum!), butter etc. Can small babies have live yogurt? They do some lovely full-fat live yogs from a local dairy at the farm shop.

I'm considering trying to make a move onto home-made bread (for reduced salt purposes). I'll see how successful Project Sourdough is, or maybe consider stealing FIL's investing in a bread maker.

I was wondering about the eating time thing as well. Don't really want to have my dinner at 5.30pm! But as I can't see H going to bed at 7pm any time soon, I don't think it will be a problem for a while. I do like the idea of us all eating together. At the moment H is sitting at the table with us when we eat - it's so funny watching him watching each mouthful go in! Fortunately DH is usually home from work by 4.30pm, which makes things easier in the family dinnertime dept. Though if we start eating really early, I may have to instigate a little supper for Mummy and Daddy later in the evening.

So, does DS1 still eat what you eat most days, but earlier in the evening?

Gui - Ellen had live yoghurt from 8 months iirc, not sure about any sooner. WFH??

Good morning. I see lots of weaning talk going on here. The unsalted butter thing is a bit tedious. We still buy it for DD1 so we always have at least two packs of butter in the fridge, sometimes three. But then she often has a few pretzels after nursery (well I am German, after all) so I probably don't need to bother with the unsalted butter any more.

Full fat milk. How anyone could want to drink anything other than full fat is beyond me anyway. I hate skimmed milk with a passion, and semi skimmed milk is rubbish in coffee. So here it's full fat all the way!

Bread. Baking your own is actually really easy without a bread maker. It just takes time as the dough needs to rest twice, so you have to plan your day around it

What exactly is baby porridge? I used to buy some lovely organic baby porridge from Germany - made from millet (which is gluten free), spelt etc. Probably what someone here has referred to. The brand is called Holle and I think you can order online. It makes a great baby supper, mixed with fruit. Must remember to order some soon.

Auld - SEVERAL nights away at 5 years old? That doesn't sound right.

Lots of packing to do today for our two weeks in Devon. I am a bit worried that autumn has already arrived and it will be cold and rainy all the time Next year we'll go away in July!

Haha Ju. your life really does revolve around food doesnt it!! lol. I am also trying to work out when to fit in babies dinner time. At the moment we usually give food about 3pm for some reason as that is when one of their feeds is due. We do actually eat between 5.30 and 6pm. and babies go to bed anywhere between 6 and 7. So you think that would be perfect but the babies are usually sooooo ratty by then that i am not sure they would be in a fit state to have dindins....

Full-fat milk for drinking, semi- for tea and skimmed for pouring down the sink! Though I'm sure I'll get used to full-fat in tea!

This baby generally goes to sleep for the night at about 8pm. There's no way in the world he'd sleep from 6 or 7, there's far too much going on! Although, having a 3 hour nap in the middle of the day like we did yesterday (both of us!) doesn't help on that front. I figured he must have needed the sleep, so I went with it.

Feier - you could have gone away in July or August this year and got nothing but wind and rain! Summer is rarely a guarantee of good weather anymore!

B has woken up with a swollen head/neck this morning. Not sure what to do. Please come over here if you have any ideas.

Thanks

Swali, have posted on your thread. I'd take her to the docs.

Hope B feels better soon Swali. Nothing further to add to the 'Yes, bother the doctor' from the others! Are you bothering them as we speak?

feier, holle cereal range available in waitrose. at least it is in mine