Random notes from the week

• For Monday night's dinner, I made a cauliflower dish spiced with onion seeds, red chilli flakes, cumin seeds, garlic, ginger, onions and turmeric. I also made a lamb curry with sweet potatoes, peas (leftover from Little Planet's dinner!), chickpeas, onion, garlic, ginger, red chilli flakes, ground cumin, ground coriander and turmeric.
  
  
• Little Planet is flat out refusing to be spoon fed now. She also resists us handing her food. All her food is now finger food that she can pick up by herself from her high-chair tray or plate - little sandwiches, cheese sticks, toast, pitta bread with hummus, pasta shells with a coating of sauce such as pesto, broccoli florets, slices of peaches, blueberries, strawberries, bananas, dry cereal, peas, sweetcorn, omelette strips or scrambled eggs - anything she can pick up herself, basically. She is our independent little girl; but it could also be related to teething. Who knows? I've been a mum for 14 months and I've finally learned that there is little point in analysing her behaviour too much as everything is a phase.
  
  
• Little Planet is also adamant that walking on her knees is infinitely preferable to walking on her two feet. She doesn't seem to mind that she looks a "right Charlie" swinging her arms and stomping around on her knees. She even prefers it to crawling now. And she is forever climbing onto and over things, over and over again. She loves our bed - particularly clambering over the pillows so she is standing up against the headboard and then diving face first flat onto the bed again... over and over and over again.
  
  
• Little Planet is so dexterous with her hands. She can screw open and close plastic bottles of water, she will eat rice grain by grain, she will pick up the tiniest thread or speck off the floor, she will put the lids back on her bottles of milk when she's finished drinking, she can place wooden sticks precisely into narrow holes... endless things she can do with her tiny fingers and hands.
  
  
• On Tuesday morning, M and I breakfasted at Carluccio's in the Brunswick in Bloomsbury before work - M had toast and croissants with butter and jam and I had the eggs Benedict.
  
  
• On Tuesday night, M left work much earlier than his usual time to put Little Planet to bed so that I could go out and entertain my clients. I took them to the Mortimer's Grill just off Oxford Street in "Noho" - good food (handcut chips and sausages), good beer (Italian) and good conversation (travel, religion, psychology, art... not the type of conversations I usually have with clients; these are very interesting people and I enjoy doing business with them).
  
  
• On the bus home, at around 9pm, there was a Chinese baby screaming his head off. Several people on the bus didn't hide their displeasure at this (as a mum, I just tuned it out). But then his parents started to play him some Chinese pop music on their mobile phone. The baby instantly fell silent. Very few people on the bus could keep a straight face. It was just too cute.
  
  
• On Wednesday, I had lunch with a few other new(-ish) mums at work. Our babies are all over 12 months now and it's funny how the topic of conversation has shifted away from baby sleeping patterns to baby feeding habits. Soon it will be all about tantrums and toilet training, I suspect.
  
  
• Other key topics of conversation amongst us new mums at my work were how we manage our daily routines (working, spending time with our babies, looking after our homes) and how we can be promoted whilst working part-time (not a key issue for me as I work full-time, but a real concern for the other mums I work with who all work part-time).
  
  
• On Thursday, my mother-in-law put Little Planet to bed so M and I could meet up after work. The two of us walked down to the National Portrait Gallery to see two excellent exhibitions: the BP Portrait Award and Francis Alys' Fabiola (photo above). Then we took a cab to Mayfair and had cocktails in Claridges and then a top notch (though a tad salty for me) dinner at Indian restaurant Benares where the fish dishes in particular were superlative . This was a belated celebratory meal to mark my birthday on the 3rd August. The cocktails were strong, the food very nice and the cab ride home much needed. Thank you M for the lovely evening.
  
  
• And now it's Friday - yippee! Despite all the socialising and going out I've been doing this week, I've been very busy at work with endless meetings and project kick-offs. Tonight I have quite bad indigestion because I was rushing around so much today and bolting down my food. But it's 7.20pm now, I've put Little Planet to bed and M is on his way home with some nice food goodies for our dinner no doubt.