Posted on

Weaning for particular babies – Fussy Baby Pasta

Small was true to form when it came to weaning. She gobbled up her first taste of baby rice, and condescended to try it a second time before deciding spoons weren’t really her thing. That left the alternative weaning method- the dreaded Baby Led Weaning.

Now don’t get me wrong, I totally get the positives people say about BLW, however for me it is rather like breastfeeding… another trap to fall into and allow my child to assert herself even more. We tried a few options: veg sticks, bread, porridge fingers, soft melty things you buy in baby food section, banana… the list is endless. Bread turned out to be a definite goer, but then I have always loved bread. But everything else was treated with suspicion, until one night when I couldn’t face cutting up more veg to throw away. I decided maybe I really needed to apply the BLW principles properly so gave her some of our stir fry including a strip of steak (our protein of choice). And what happened? The noodles were used as a lasso, the veg was pushed all over the tray and the steak… straight in her mouth like a total pro. She sucked and gnawed at it for 10 whole minutes, licking her lips and sucking her hands. So I’d cracked weaning – Small was a carnivore!

I really found weaning horrendous, it was as if the success I’d had moving her onto bottles was being thrown back at me. I’d wanted to follow Annabel Karmel’s plans as her weaning method made total sense to me. But as it happened Small decided spoons were to be avoided for quite sometime. This was frustrating and demoralising. I’d lovingly made ice cube trays full of purees that just got spat out (interestingly Ella’s didn’t, she loved and still loves Ella’s purées). Then we discovered favourite food number 2, and soon to be food to save all situations- Petit Filous! Ironically the only yoghurt that’s not a yoghurt I will eat too. Oh the sheer joy that tiny pot of happiness produced was so wonderful I nearly cried! And then there was my piece de resistance!

Sausage pasta. Packed full of veggies, easy and quick to make and super super tasty. She started off sucking the sauce off rigatoni, and then (when we had succeeded in reintroducing spoons a few months into our weaning “journey”) I tried spoon feeding her just the sauce. She couldn’t get enough of it. It was so odd, she wouldn’t touch blended foods but she would eat foods that were effectively minced. You’ll notice a recurring theme when it comes to my little Small – she knows her own mind 🤦🏻‍♀️.

This pasta sauce recipe was so effective I thought I would share it for all those Mummies out there struggling to get kids to eat veg. But also this isn’t just for babies we’ve been eating this for years, I ate pasta everyday when I was pregnant and this was a weekly dinner in our house.

First the acknowledgement, this recipe was inspired by Jamie Oliver’s Pregnant Jools Pasta from his 30 Minute Meals collection. I have however bulked out the recipe with extra goodies. This serves our family of 3 (2 hungry adults and small person) twice (I freeze the additional batch in a large freezer bag pressed into a sheet).

NOTE: You need a food processor for this recipe (or exceptional knife skills!)

Ingredients:

  • half bunch of spring onions
  • celery sticks (strings removed)
  • 1 medium carrot (peeled and cut into 4)
  • 1 red pepper
  • 1 medium courgette (seeds removed)
  • 3 speciality sausages (I use Sainsbury’s TTD chorizo-style)
  • 2 cloves of garlic
  • Tsp oregano
  • 1 carton/tin of chopped tomatoes
  • 6 pieces frozen spinach
  • Pasta (we love Rigatoni!)
    First prep the veg by removing the stalks, seeds and rubbishy ends. Cut into largish chunks and chuck in the food processor. Whizz until finely chopped
    Skin the sausages and add into the processor one at a time and whizz until the sausages are broken up and combined. You’ll end up with a mince mixture, not a paste
    Heat a large frying or sauté pan on high (I cook everything in a high sided sauté pan), and add a few squirts of spray olive oil (prevents the sauce getting too greasy!)
    Add the ragu mixture and cook until the sausage mince dries out (approximately 5 mins)
    Boil the kettle for the pasta
    Crush or grate garlic into the sauce and then add the oregano stirring to combine then add the tomatoes. Nestle the spinach pieces into the sauce and reduce the heat to medium, allowing the sauce to bubble away gently while you sort the pasta.
    Stir the sauce occasionally to prevent it catching and the distribute the spinach.
    After 7 mins the sauce may start to dry out, so add half a cup of the starchy pasta water to loosen it up, the water will also help the sauce stick to the pasta.
    Just before the pasta is ready I divide the sauce so that I have my freezer batch as the pasta is going to be added into the sauce before serving.
    When ready drain the pasta and mix into the sauce. If you are a pro like Jamie Oliver you can toss the pasta properly, but I’m not so I just give it a good mix through before liberally adding grated Parmesan.

I hope your Little Ones enjoy! It’s pasta with a Small seal of approval- very hard to come by I can tell you!

Please follow and like me:
Posted on

1st Birthday Blues

Very strange happenings occurred a few weeks ago. Small was turning 1 in a few days and out of nowhere I suddenly started feeling very off. I was really emotional, on edge and very anxious seemingly out of nowhere.

Admittedly we’d had a bit of a nightmare month, it started with our first ever trip to urgent care a few weeks back with conjunctivitis. The following weekend she had an alarming fever and a dreadful night breaking out in a strange looking eczema flare that then became a rather alarming rash. 2 more trips to an out of hours GP and then urgent care suggested firstly infected eczema but then actually it was Hand Foot & Mouth. So that was our Nursery Plague initiation complete! By the end of the weekend I had a sore throat and despite Small being all better bar the rash, I was off work for half the week with what felt like flu (and real flu not just a bad cold!). So yes adults can get HF&M and yes it is worse and different to what kids get. Just in case you ever question whether you have adult HF&M I had flu like symptoms for 3 days and then on day 5 blisters on my hands and feet (rather than day 3) and then day 7 spots all round my mouth and chin – NICE! And a sore throat like nothing I’ve ever experienced… Anyway I’ve digressed as usual. We were then in urgent care the next weekend when her eyes swelled up again but this time it was hay fever. Hilariously we were given drops to use twice a day… oh yes if you think administering antibiotics to an infant is hard try eye drops!

And then we had teething…

Small didn’t have any teeth yet (and yes I do worry I’ve given her too much fruit and they’ve rotted before they’ve even come through…). Since she was 3 months I have blamed lots of things on teething, however nothing we’ve experienced before compares to what we had to endure at the end of that week. Scary fevers, waterfalls of dribble, limpet style cuddling, odd interruptions of hysterical screaming and clinginess – lots and lots of clinginess. And this was during a scorching heatwave! Hideous. Then when all of that seemed to have settled down slightly she broke out in an odd looking heat rash all over her face. I just imploded! After so much going on my over worked, over imaginative, paranoid mind freaked out and rang 111 for the fourth weekend in a row panicking that my child had measles 🤦🏻‍♀️ (I should add a great big thank you to the very lovely people at 111 definitely one of the best NHS services I have come across). They quickly reassured me that it sounded like a regular heat rash (albeit not raised) and she would be very very poorly if she had measles…

So given the above it’s understandable that I might have been feeling slightly on edge. What I was feeling was like PMS, but at the wrong time! Hubby also cottoned on because when I randomly burst into tears declaring I just felt so out of control he just responded with “are you on your period?”. Not massively helpful I know but a fair observation.

So that brings us to the weird feelings of fear and weepiness. I woke up on Monday with the “worry tum”, something was worrying me but I had no idea what. I got on the train to go to work and opened my phone to a picture of Small (my wallpaper) and my eyes pricked with tears – what is happening to me? And not the best place to have an emotional moment on a busy train full of grumpy commuters. This continued all day, weird feelings of panic, I risked tears everytime I saw her picture, I nearly rang nursery on 2 occasions to make sure she was ok. This situation was not helped by it being by far the worst day at work I’ve had since long before I went on maternity. Every time someone asked how Small was (was she excited about her birthday?!) the waterworks threatened. When I text Hubby to say I was feeling off (understatement of the year!), he responded with a lovely message and a picture of Small on the swings, and this sent me well and truly over the edge. I actually had to have a blub in the toilets. I should stress this is not how I am EVER! Admittedly I have had weird PMS since being pregnant but even that doesn’t compare to this crazy, emotional overload.

The worry tum was there every morning that week. Completely unexplained and unfounded. I didn’t think I was worried about anything. So naturally I spoke to my NCT friends (a very solid self help group!) to find I wasn’t alone, others had also felt this weird emotional and anxiety surge. I then did a Google, and guess what? This is so common! For many mums out there this emotional tailspin happens every year approaching a child’s birthday, not just the first.

What I find odd is it’s not like I’m remembering things from the birth or afterwards but just thinking about my precious little Small manifests these overwhelming emotions. Perhaps I was also suffering with my own version of separation anxiety that the babies also suffer with at this age? Wouldn’t that be weird? It definitely calmed over the course of the week but the panic remained in my stomach threatening to re-emerge.

For me that Monday was a bit of an eye opener, maybe it is completely normal to feel like this but it reminded me I had resolved to look into counselling once I was back at work. There are still demons from those first few weeks after Small was born that need to be put to rest.

On a happier note, Small had a remarkable transformation for her birthday weekend returning to our wonderful bundle of joy with no sign of the clingy baby. She was the life and soul of her party which was a relief, and a couple of days later her first teeth arrived – maybe they hadn’t rotted away after all!

To all the mummies out there 😘

Please follow and like me:
Posted on

Maternity Leave – Imagination vs. Reality

This time last year I was preparing to start my maternity leave and was regaling colleagues with grand plans for my time off. I was building a cabin at the bottom of my garden to be the new playroom myself and Small – picture her sat playing quietly and happily on the floor (for hours I might add) while I got on with my crafting activities, writing about our wonderful time together and the amazing projects I was not only be starting but, more importantly, completing!

From this new base of operations (and with all the spare time I would have now I wasn’t working) I planned to establish a wedding decoration hire business showcasing all the beautiful items we had made a couple of years before (and additions I would make to the collection in all this free time). I dismissed my coffee buddy’s attempts to manage my expectations of parenthood and what was likely to be achievable during mat leave, in my mind I was pretty efficient and a great manager of work-life balance. Loads of women have built successful businesses during maternity leave and I was going to be among them – this time next year I was going to be a successful self-employed mum who wouldn’t be facing the prospect of going back to work!!!

What have I learnt?

  1. Any woman who has built a business with a baby in tow is a goddess of enterprise and independence. I am not kidding. I really thought I was pretty good at managing time, tasks, work/home and all that jazz. I was creating activity logs for my baby on day 1 of mat leave (4 weeks before due date and 6 weeks before she decided to arrive). I was going to track every nappy, feed, nap, active period, night-time sleep and milestones in a beautifully maintained (and colour-coded) journal that would go everywhere with me and enable me to trend her patterns. In reality I didn’t even fill in the first day! I found an app that would time my feeds given my phone was the only thing other than the baby that was always within reach and manageable one-handed and that was it. Everything else was just lucky if it happened!
  2. Being a full-time parent is the most intense job you will ever encounter. It does not matter how organised you are, the first few months are about survival. After that you have to come to terms with living in a world dominated by a reliably inconsistent tyrant. As my best friend told me, life with kids is just 1 big guessing game, where the right answer yesterday is the wrong answer today! Also little people need you all the time, even going to the loo is nearly impossible… I found only once Small could sit up at 5 months could we really begin to stop hovering in her vicinity and relax into enjoying parenting.
  3. Finding time to do your own thing is really important, but sometimes it is difficult (or impossible) to achieve. Around the time Small started sitting independently, she finally started to take a bottle (after a battle of wills that began when she was 8 weeks old). At this point I finally had the confidence to leave the house on my own. Small was a boob girl and liked to spend most of her time there, meaning any kind of independence was practically non-existent. Accepting this state of affairs was very hard and a major bump in my early motherhood rollercoaster.
  4. Crafting could be possible but it had to start small and in non-complex projects that could easily be put down without any difficulty finding my place. But more importantly, completing a project was the best feeling in the world.
  5. It took me nearly a year from when my cabin was built to fully move in! Ironically I spent week 38 of my pregnancy white-washing my safe haven before I moved in the craft emporium I had been accruing over years of hoarding. I finally finished moving in when Small was 7 months. I then spent the hours of free time I snatched reorganising my materials and projects (not crafting). The first item crafted in the cabin was when Charlotte of Flying Colours Pottery visited to paint the footprints of Small and her friends, the weekend she turned 10 months!

When I look back at how I started motherhood I see a glowing preggo (I am one of those hated people who had a wonderful pregnancy) full of dreams, who then shattered to pieces after the birth of our precious Small, and gradually put herself back together piece by piece. I underestimated what being a parent entailed, but I also underestimated just how powerless you are when nature dictates your path. But it doesn’t really matter because the gift I was granted makes everything worthwhile.

Please follow and like me: