I said I was going to write about cooking (sorry, to be completely truthful, that should be “cooking”) this week, didn’t I, but first an update.
The pooing may be coming under control. Now we’re looking at once, maybe twice, a day and Joe hasn’t woken up dirty in the night for a few nights. He’s still waking up between 4 and 4.30am which is a pain, but whaddaya gonna do?
I’ll tell you what his father wants to do. He wants Joe to go into his own room. Despite the fact that Harry went into his own room (very happily) at four months, I don’t want Joe to go. Harry was a very noisy sleeper and Joe barely makes a sound. But it’s not just that. I want him to stay with me. He seems much more of a baby to me than Harry did (which is crazy, because what was Harry at four months, if not a baby? He was hardly ready to strike out on his own, was he?). But I digress.
So the “cooking”. We had carrots. In fact, we had organic carrots. What could be better? Carrots are easy to cook and mash, aren’t they? Mashed carrots were a staple of Sunday dinners when I was growing up and so mashed carrots it would be. I peeled them. I chopped them. I put them in a pan of water. I brought the water to the boil. I lowered it to a simmer. I checked the carrots: hard. I made my own lunch. I ate it. I checked the carrots: hard. I washed the dishes. I did some hoovering. (Yeah okay. I checked my emails. I did some tweeting. Whatever.) The point is, time passed. And I checked the carrots: not exactly hard, but far from soft. I brought them back to the boil. The pan almost boiled dry. I boiled the kettle, added more water, boiled and boiled and boiled. I thought about the environment. I looked at all the pots of organic food in the cupboard. I fed Joe from a pot.
After probably – and I’m not even joking – an hour an a half, I decided the carrots weren’t exactly soft, but probably weren’t going to get any softer either. I drained them. I mashed them. I scraped them into the bin. They were still too hard to feed to Joe without giving me the choking heebie-jeebies.
But I’m in two minds about the cooking anyway. Joe adores the pots – the Summer Pudding puree is still going down a treat and there’s a Fruity Chicken that he can’t get enough of – and I love the convenience. Yes, I feel like I *should* be making him things, but only because I feel that’s what I’m supposed to do. That that makes me a “good” mummy, whereas giving him so much prepared foods makes me a “bad” one. But we’re both happy and he’s thriving. So I’m trying to get over myself. And I’m giving him lots of bananas (nature’s convenience food).
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Keris Stainton
