Book bashing

Last week I was feeling under the weather (again) and it felt like
Isobel's early waking had reached epic proportions.

I was super tired, super fed up and feeling like a decidedly not super
mum.

So, I went to Amazon and ordered a bundle of parenting toddler books.

I don't really know why I did this as I felt much more confident and
happier as a mum when I STOPPED reading baby books.

I mean why bother opening the package, why not just let PD beat me
about the head with it.

But, I had tried pretty much EVERYTHING

When Isobel was 4 or 5 months old she started sleeping through the night, it only took two nights of rocking instead of feeding and I had a baby who slept until 6:45 and woke up happy and chatty.

Then at 8 months she got sick, vomitty sick and by 9 months would wake up hungry at 5:30.

Once she was well, I tried the rocking thing again, often holding her crying until it got to 6 and then I would feed her, to get her out of any habit. Limited success from this one.

Then after a few months I just started passing her her bottle into her cot, she'd drink and go back to sleep until 7 ish - not a bad deal. Reducing the milk I thought she'd just grow out of it.

Until she stopped going back to sleep. Then I got super tired...

I browsed the world wide mummy web and everyone said it was bedtime routine. Well, as Isobel has a bath, a cuddle, a bottle and then waves bye bye and blows kisses from her cot, our bedtime routine isn't an issue.

And, she has always been really good at waking up, making a noise and then getting herself back to sleep. Unless, she is hungry...

Anyway, having boosted the economy by ordering books, I set about fixing it myself.

Cereal in bottle, helped a little. A snack at 6 in front of telly was not quite so helpful. But, supper at the garden table after nursery (where they give them tea at 4pm) seemed to help considerably.

We are still working on it, but I think we are getting there (except on days like Sunday when Isobel doesn't want to eat).

The books have arrived and at first glance I don't like Toddler Taming; the opening of Gina Ford is a good explanation of age groups and worth PD reading, nothing new in it for me, but, shock, horror, I actually like the way she has written it; Baby Whisperer for Toddlers seems OK; Potty Training in one Week again nothing really new but love the idea of getting baby out of nappies in a week. Yes I am aware that I preferred Baby Whisperer over Gina when I was pregnant but I'd still say best Baby book was Baby Development Week by Week.

So, I have books, but I suspect they will end up like the others - on eBay

Sent from my iPhone

Something I LOVE is books

And I really hope Isobel does too, so I was excited by this post on The Jackson Files (I guess as it was second-hand then it really is a third hand post here):


"Someone” reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. It’s not the Big Read though — they don’t publish books, and they’ve only featured these books so far. So here we go…

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Highlight the ones you still want to read but just have not had a chance yet!
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 or less and force books upon them.


1. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
3. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
5. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
6. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
7. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
12. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
13. His Dark Materials (trilogy) - Philip Pullman
14. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
15. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
18. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
19. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm - George Orwell
25. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
27. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
28. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
30. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
32. Complete Works of Shakespeare
33. Ulysses - James Joyce
34. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
36. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
37. The Bible
38. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
40. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
41. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
46. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
48. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
49. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
51. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
53. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
54. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
55. Middlemarch - George Eliot
56. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
57. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
60. Emma -
61. Persuasion -Jane Austen
62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
64. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
65. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
67. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement - Ian McEwan
70. Dune - Frank Herbert
71. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
72. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
73. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
74. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
75. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
77. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
78. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
79. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie * (next on my list as recommended by Jenny)
82. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
83. Dracula - Bram Stoker
84. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
85. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
86. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
87. Germinal - Emile Zola
88. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
89. Possession - A.S. Byatt
90. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
91. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
92. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
93. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
94. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
96. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
97. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
98. Watership Down – Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
100. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

Well, still a fair few unread, but I've definitely read more than six and I'm sure there are some that should be here but aren't, Slinky Malinki, the rapscallion cat is missing for a start!

Six Weeks and a Valuable Lesson Learnt

When I was pregnant I loved buying and reading books about babies. Not so much for the information but to wallow in the amazing fact that I was pregnant, yes me, having a baby. Wow.

Now that seems to be all a little too much information.

Being a parent seems to have become all about 'shoulds', books tell you should do this and not that, and none of them agree. Advice is offerred and the 'should's are often tempered with 'try', all this advice comes from the heart and is well intentioned and I know it is up to me to take it or leave it.

Right now I think I need to 'leave it' a while. I've packed away the books because my instincts cannot be heard over the sound of all those 'shoulds'.

There is no greater body of knowledge than a mothers instinct. Here's to getting to know my baby a little more every day.

Spot the Mistake

Yes, that's right - in our house baby wears the hair.

Jackanory

One of my big weaknesses is bookshops and books and one of the things I am most looking forward to about being a mother is reading bedtime (or anytime, for that matter) stories to my child. In fact it is one of my favourite things, I think my dream job would be to be a narrator on Jackanory.

Our lucky child already has a growing collection of books, some are lovely gifts from Grandma, Clare and Ryan, and Jackson (although I think Rebecca may have helped); but many have been bought by RD and I.

(One of RD's purchases is a book called Bob and Co, in which Bob thinks he is god... and I just can't resist a Treasury* or a beautiful classic edition.)

I'm not waiting for a baby to read them to, I have just spent a blissful half-an-hour reading poems to my bump.

* I still have the Hilda Boswell's Treasury of Poetry from when I was a little girl, it's a little worse for wear since I fell down a drain clutching it, but I still LOVE it.

Baby Books

I am an avid reader, I don’t really like to go anywhere without a book, so for me one of the natural reactions to being pregnant was to log onto Amazon and see what books I could order. It wasn’t so much that I was worried about what I didn’t know, but more because I was excited and this was a way of adding to my enjoyment of impending motherhood.

Having been pregnant before I already had one book, and until the danger of miscarriage had passed I didn’t allow myself to buy anymore. My technical book of choice was ‘The Pregnancy Bible’ I love the way it is written: the fold out pictures of what is happening to my body and the graphics of the baby. It’s sensible, down to earth and helpful. (We did have ‘What to Expect when you are Expecting’ but gave it to a charity shop having decided it was too much like a text book and certainly not pretty enough.)

The Fat Ladies Club was a collection of mildly amusing stories about being pregnant, but it didn’t really do much for me. Maybe it’s because I think my girlfriends’ stories are funnier.

The next book I read was Jo Frost (Supernanny) Confident Baby Care, and I loved this book. I love the fact that she sees a parent’s role as being to show the baby how wonderful the world is, she made me excited to be a Mum. I have said if there is one book RD reads it should be this one, it will teach about technicalities such as nappy changing and swaddling but also about the joy of being a parent. Her advice is realistic and practical but loving at the same time.

Next I read a book I knew I’d hate, Gina Ford. I had to read it to make sure I wasn’t dismissing something out of hand without really knowing what it was about. I hated it. I like the fact the baby is quickly in a routine – who wouldn’t (and some of the bedtime advice might be useful), but it made me feel like being a Mum was only going to be a chore, not a thing of joy and wonder like Jo. I wanted to burn this book.

Having watched ‘Bringing Up Baby’ (and sharing the national Clare-Verity-should-be-burned-at-the-stake opinion) I did buy Dr Spock, but I haven’t read it, it looks like another text book.

On the recommendation of my Pilates teacher I have just finished reading Dr Gowri Motha’s Gentle Birth Method; this is where he had picked up the visualisations from. While I’m not entirely convinced thinking of waves will make labour easier, I thought it worth adding to my arsenal. Dr Motha has excellent credentials; she is a disillusioned obstetrician who decided that there must be a gentler approach to birth that would benefit both mother and child. Her pregnancy diet is strict – I don’t think I could give up my cheese and marmite paninis, and there are lots of herbal remedies, but as someone who believes in the strength of meditation and whose spiritual side likes to tap into the power of Reiki, the idea of visualisations and self-hypnosis to help calm and reassure does appeal. So I’ve also bought the CD. (I’m not so sure about the vaginal stretching; I know it makes sense but …)

I have a couple more baby books on my bedside table; I’ll let you know when I’ve read them.