There's been a constant buzz of activity in our tiny kitchen during the last few weeks - pans being stirred, hand blender being whizzed and food containers being filled up with different dishes for a growing baby to feed on. Cooking for your little one can be rather challenging, finding time to do it whilst looking after a mobile baby is not easy, but it can be cheap and rewarding.
Official Department of Health guidelines recommend starting weaning at around six months old but at around 19 weeks Isaac was showing the classic signs of being ready to take solid food. We took the advice of my mother-in-law, a health visitor, and started him on a mix of baby rice or porridge from the box with a mixed variety of vegetables and fruits bought from the local green grocers and pureed using the hand blender (a Christmas present).
Our child started off very greedy wanting to try everything and constantly asking for more but after three weeks and after going on two meals a day, he started getting fussy and irritable at meal times. I have read it was normal and just persisted, trying to make each meal time as fun as possible by putting him on his high chair and having meals with him. After a week and with more variety of food choices mixed together he started to open his mouth again and gobble everything like there is no tomorrow.
Preparing his meals is not at all easy but I have allotted a day to cook them which falls on Thursdays when the library is closed, there are no play dates or swimming classes to go to and food shopping is done in the morning. Picking recipes from baby cook books borrowed from the library (Annabel Karmel and Gina Ford are a good start) and getting a free copy of Cow and Gate 5 Step Weaning Plan pack (which comes with free vouchers) made the job a bit less daunting. And with plenty of space in the freezer to help keep the food for longer, there is no reason why homemade baby cooking is not possible. Occasionally though when we are out and about, we do use ready made emergency packs that are as good and as healthy (albeit more expensive if resorted to every day).
At six months we have already established three meals a day which includes fish and meat, complimented by breastfeeding four times a day and a bottle feed at night to keep him fuller for longer. The meal planners from the books also helped in creating a mixed and varied diet, a free Heinz meal planner can also be found online. I'm hoping that by helping Isaac develop a taste for healthy food now we will be making meal times a lot easier in the years to come.
It all began with Sweet Valley Twins No. 12. My ten-year-old self was rummaging through my mother's work drawers (without her knowledge of course) and discovered the confiscated treasure. An unfortunate student in her fifth grade class was caught reading the book during lessons and was severely punished. The book was returned eventually but not before I have been drawn to the fictional world of Jessica and Elizabeth in sunny California where adventure beckoned at every turn.
By the time I was twelve and have read at least a hundred books on the series, half of them I owned, I was ready to move on. Well, to Babysitter's Club that is, where I collected at least 30 books on the series. Then in high school, I discovered the thicker volumes of Sydney Sheldon, John Grisham, Ken Follet and Mary Higgins Clark amongst others. My bookshelf has begun to look like a library, with a single author having five or more books on my shelf. The best count was Agatha Christie's with a whopping 50 books, most of them bought from my allowance as a staff writer in a corporate paper whilst at college.
This compulsion only grew stronger once I entered the working world. Reading has become my escape from the lonely weekends I would spend in my windowless room in Makati where I would read until the wee hours of the morning lit only by a dim bedside lamp (how I managed to keep a 20/20 vision until now is still a mystery). Three years in that miserable dump has produced a hundred more paperback novels and hardbound books from my weekly visits to the bookshops.
When I left to work overseas, I sent all of them home with a heavy heart. But the habit did not die. Even a cramped country like Gibraltar has an abundance of second-hand novels that soon I was rebuilding a library. By this time, it was no longer about reading them, it has become a desire to hoard evidenced by the fact that of the 15 James Patterson novels I have bought from my brief fascination with his psychological thrillers, I have only finished three. But this realisation did not stop me from acquiring more. Of the two medium boxes I packed when I left for Britain, a quarter was occupied by my books alone.
This addiction was not helped by the wealth of charity shops selling cheap second hand books in Sheffield. I stopped buying bestsellers and started collecting works of critically acclaimed novelists hoping that I would be able to learn from them. But the more I collected them, the less time I have to flip through their pages and before I knew it, another hundred books have gathered dusts and cobwebs in our library.
If they can only sit in the bookshelf until I would have time for them, then it wouldn't have been a problem. But we have moved into four different houses in the last three years and the storage problem has propped up in more than two occasions, an issue I refused to acknowledge but it was something that my husband was determined to address.
"A Kindle is the answer", he said one day.
"I don't know", I replied. "It wouldn't be the same."
Besides, it was everything against my principles, Amazon being one of the biggest tax evaders of this country and the cause of so many businesses in the high street closing down.
But his insistence and another imminent move sealed the deal and last week, we bought the handheld device from a tax-paying company that sells the product which turned out better than expected.
I would still prefer the paperback of course and someday when we have finally 'settled down', I might have a chance to rebuild my library. But for the meantime, my beloved books will find a home in my sister's bookshelves in our family home where the rest of the 400 novels she has inherited dwells (memories of our childhood she says, that's why she refuses to give any of them away). And the Kindle will keep me company for now.
My English mum's attic is a vintage treasure trove.
I have only just recently taken on the vintage craze and I suspect it would only cover anything that relates to books, photography and travel. Our clean-up project of our Mum's attic has delivered all of that.
The best find will be the Brownie Box No. 2, a Kodak film camera that was first introduced in 1902 but was discontinued in 1935. The camera has introduced the concept of snapshot, being accessible at an original cost of $2. They wouldn't sell much as antiques because they have been very popular when they came out but to have one in the family seemed rather romantic.
I have also found hardbound books with colourful covers that were published more than a century ago; an old Atlas printed when half the world was still under the British empire and a King James Bible (which I found was rather inspiring to read because of the larger text) the sort that you will find in church altars.
As family treasures, we couldn't take any of them of course. But I managed to bring home an old suitcase I will be filling with stickers of all the places we have been to!
