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.

The one and only

The other day, a colleague of mine, who has two children of his own and another on the way, asked me when I was planning my second child. He was shocked when I replied, “I am not planning any more children. This is it for me.” I did not express surprise at his shock because I know both his question and his reaction are common. Instead, I simply responded to his “Why?!" with “Because I am happy with the way things are.” M would not mind a second child, but he is so content with the daughter he has that he is happy for our family to remain three. Of course, there are several reasons for my decision to have just one child, and these are them:

• I have never been and am still not a maternal person
• I have never been broody and would have been content without children. I decided to have a child because I could see how wonderful it would be for M and also because I wanted a “little M”!
• If I ever saw myself with a child when I was growing up it was always with a daughter - I have a daughter now and I am not bothered about having a son
• My daughter is so perfect and lovely that I am 100% content just having her in my life
• I am not a patient person and do not do well in chaotic circumstances - my baby was a very easy baby who napped well and slept through the night from 12 weeks and yet I still struggled on maternity leave
• I am a loner by nature and need a lot of time on my own - I would be run ragged with two little people demanding my time and attention
• Life hasn't changed much with one - I can still go out, I can still work at a career I love, I still have money to do things
• I can't imagine loving another child as much as I love my daughter - I know, objectively, that I would be able to, but I simply don't want to
• Ultimately, I am an only child and had a wonderful childhood, even with two fulltime working parents. I was never lonely as I had several close friends, I have wonderful memories of weekends with my parents, they took me on lovely holidays abroad, I was incredibly independent, I talked and read early, I was very sociable with other adults, I wasn’t spoiled, I have always been close to my parents. I know from experience that being an only can be a terrific experience

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Clueless

Most of our grey and rainy Saturday was spent wandering through Marylebone - buying crisp white cotton bed linen from The White Company; lunching on salads of smoked mackerel and white beans (M) and chickpeas, goats cheese, roast squash and sun blush tomato pesto (me) at The Natural Kitchen; and browsing the Scandinavian designer tableware and furniture at Iittala. Laden down with goodies, we cabbed it to Covent Garden where we watched the terrifically tense and brooding modern Western movie No Country For Old Men (photo above) by the back-to-form Coen Brothers.

In Marylebone, we also popped into Daunt Books, where M picked up Mario Batali's mouthwatering collection of simple, everyday Italian recipes Molto Italiano (photo above), and I headed straight to the Pregnancy & Childcare section. The first book I bought was Dr Miriam Stoppard's First-time Parents: What Every New Parent Needs To Know, with chapters on how to change a newborn's nappy, how to bathe and dress it (photo below), how to feed it, how to soothe it when it cries, and other basic guides.

This morning, M and I were lazing in bed (those days will soon be gone) chatting about how neither of us have ever changed a nappy, how I've never even held a newborn baby (and M can barely remember if he has). Basically, we have no clue. How can we bring new life into the world?

I remember my good friends D and J telling me of the day they brought their firstborn home. All the well-wishers had departed and they were left alone sitting on the sofa holding a newborn who wouldn't stop crying and all they could say to each other was, "What the hell do we do now?".

My mum emailed me this morning telling me that she and my dad had no clue either and it was worse for her because none of her family was around. She wrote that, "We even didn't know how to raise a little baby. When you used to scream with tummy ache due to wind and refused to feed I used to cry. But we coped, didn't we? You became so nice and sweet." This, despite being a paediatrician. She just muddled through and it all worked out in the end.

I guess we'll just have to take it day by day, but believe me I am now doing a lot of reading - witness all the magazines I have bought... and that's just half of them!

Another book I picked up at Daunt Books was Ann Pleshette Murphy's The Seven Stages Of Motherhood, which explores the various shifts in identity a woman goes through as her child matures from a fetus in the womb to a toddler, from a school child to a young adult. Its focus is not on pregnancy, birth and child-rearing but on the woman as mother, and I'm enjoying it because it begins with defining motherhood as an identity that begins at conception.

On Friday night, I also downloaded from iTunes an audiobook of Deepak Chopra's A Holistic Guide To Pregnancy and listen to it at night as I drop off to sleep.

Now that I've passed the 20 week milestone, I feel more secure in imagining a life beyond pregnancy and the life of our baby. The Chopra and Murphy books are very meditative and are provoking all sorts of feelings and thoughts in me, which no doubt will gradually surface in this blog.