RTFM By Kate

"They don't come with instructions," is a favourite comment, usually given by a well-meaning friend or relative at some point soon after the birth of a first baby.

In fact, that's not quite true. Babies may not have a label with their washing instructions dangling from their navel when they exit the womb, but there are loads of step-by-step manuals available on how to bring up babies and children. Thankfully.

There's a school of thought that goes, "Put away the books and listen to your instincts," but when it comes to parenting, I don't subscribe to that one. I'm naturally a reader anyway and I've always liked having some kind of "How To..." book related to my most passionate interests.

For example, when I started writing songs, I began by listening to my instincts and taking what I had absorbed from the music surrounding me in order to construct my lyrics and melodies. My early efforts weren't too bad, but they weren't that good either. Once I read a few books about songwriting however, the improvement was immediate. A song may be born in a soup of mood, inspiration and half-remembered bits and bobs of other songs, but it takes a piece of proper know-how to craft it. To take an embryonic idea and shape it into something ready for the world outside.

And it's the same with children. We think we instinctively know how to parent, but where do we get those instincts? Parental love may be instinctive, but the nuts and bolts of bringing up a child aren't. Not even the keeping warm/safe/well-fed etc. etc. part. Plenty of social workers and health professionals will tell you that.

As for things like dealing with tantrums; encouraging socially acceptable behaviour; fostering empathy and a myriad of other abstract concepts, instinct has little to do with it in my view. Our "instincts" in that regard are actually a hotch-potch of learned behaviours from our own parents; our observations of other parents; and what comes flying past us in the cultural ether.

So when it comes to sussing out some effective parenting techniques, rather than muddling through in a hit or miss fashion, I'm happy to take some tips from people who profess to know their stuff.

It's easy enough - for most people - to grow a child. But if you ask me, true parentcraft has a lot more thought behind it. And if a book on the subject can stop me spending stressful hours trying to reinvent the wheel, that's fine by me.

To eat (meat) or not to eat - that is the question - by Theo

Yesterday was Rosie's one year check up at the local medico's. Mercifully there were no injections due this time (the next are at 15 months) but sadly her appointment for her weighing and measuring wasn't with the friendly, amiable nurse, but with the grumpy pediatrician, who has the beside manner of a coat hanger. She's the one who criticized us for using a sling and expressed disbelief at our vegetarian diet. Naturally this was a subject she returned to again.

Rosie weighed in at 7.3 kilos, standing (or, rather crawling) 69 cms tall (long). Apparently this means she's underweight. Well, yes, technically she is - consulting the curve on our Documento de Salud Infantil she is just below the lowest percentile band for weight, though she's within it for height. After quizzing me about her diet (which includes such protein-rich foods as quinoa, chickpeas, lentils, eggs, cheese, sweetcorn in pretty much every meal) the pediatrician saw this as her cue to berate me for starving my daughter of the necessary chicken and fish Rosie apparently needs to put on muscle mass (naturally we want our daughter to be a sumo wrestler in later life). Veggie proteins just won't do.

Being a relatively recent convert to vegetarianism (5 years) I'm quite the Zealot and thus would really rather not feed my daughter meat or fish for a variety of moral and environmental reasons. Plus I'm not too worried about Rosie's size, for a few reasons:

1. Kate is just over 5 feet tall (1metre 52), as are Rosie's aunts on both sides of the family. They all ate meat and fish as children. So, I reckon that Rosie would still grow up to be petite even if we fed her prime steak 3 times a day. It's just in the genes.

2. While Rosie may be underweight for a 12 month-old, she is not underweight for an 11 month-old - and she was born a month premature. So, if we adjust for that, she's fine...

3. Finally, she's perfectly healthy and seems to be reaching all the development milestones at around the normal time.

Obviously Rosie's health and development would trump all other considerations. So, if by the next weigh-in in 3 months time she's fallen even further behind the curve then I'll slaughter the chicken myself. But for now it's chickpea and sweetcorn pancakes...

One By Kate

Exactly a year ago she was a teeny tiny, very red baby with a generous amount of dark hair and piercing blue eyes. She was born four weeks early, showed little interest in feeding, was deaf in one ear and had a tummy button hernia. She was also, as far as we were concerned, perfect. The startling disparity in the size of her newborn feet is a trick of the light.A year on Rosie is still small for her age, but a giant compared to her former self. Her skin colour is pinky-beige, she's got a generous amount of hair still and those eyes remain a piercing blue, although with tones of grey. Both ears work fine, her tummy button has subsided and as for her feeding? See below.
We still think she's perfect. And her feet are definitely the same size, give or take.

364 Days on the curve By Kate

The eve of Rosie's first birthday is an ideal time to reflect on what I've learned in the last year. It's certainly been a steep curve in many respects - harder than I thought it would be, but easier as well.

So, in no particular order, since becoming a mother I have learned:

-that I am not especially grossed out by my daughter's poo-filled nappies.
-that I can function cheerfully (most of the time) on an average of five hours of broken sleep per night.
-that honey is banned in the first year because it can give babies botulism.
-that olive oil and chamomile tea applied to a baby's rear end can help see off nappy rash.
-that babies often sleep better at night if they've had plenty of sleep during the day and worse if they haven't.
-that the details of my daughter's excreta could be such a source of endless fascination.
-what a "snotsucker"; a "sleep regression"; "cruising"and "a good latch" all mean in parental context.
-that I can talk for hours about the minutiae of our day together, even if we haven't really done anything in particular.
-that I now find conversations about other people's children genuinely interesting.
-how nippy I can be when manoeuvring a pram or buggy.
-that I have hitherto unknown reserves of total silliness when it comes to making faces/noises/doing dances etc.
-that I never knew just how strongly my heart-strings could be twanged by another human being.
-how much I would enjoy it.

Learning the lingo By Kate

The other day Theo chided me gently on not making enough effort to improve my Spanish. With complete justification. I'm making virtually no effort at all. Oh yes, I half-listen to Spanish talk radio when I'm in the kitchen and I chat with our Hispanic friends and neighbours, but my understanding of the language is intermittent at best and my speech is akin to a toddler-age child.

My reply was that I was busy learning another new language and Spanish had been squeezed out by my beleaguered brain - or at least, severely relegated. That other new language is called Motherhood.

Then I thought about it some more. Yes, as a metaphor it's not bad, but it doesn't go far enough. I'm not just learning a new language. I'm learning to find my way through a new foreign country.

It's challenging, stimulating, constantly changing, exhausting, stressful, hilarious and highly rewarding. I get lost and take wrong turnings all the time. I try and consult a map, only to find I'm holding it upside down. New vocabulary like "sleep regression" and "snotsucker" have to be learned and I spend many hours scouring text-books for clues to the grammatical rules. Only to find there aren't any.

Suddenly, the myriad Spanish verb endings seem like a walk in the park.

Here Rosie, Rosie, Rosie! - by Theo

Now she's started crawling in earnest, locating Rosie can occasionally be problematic. You turn your head for a moment and suddenly she's in her room attempting to scale her cot or she's nipped into the bathroom to try her hand at opening the drawers.

Still no matter where she goes, it's always pretty easy to find her again...

2 years - by Theo

I didn't notice it at the time, but the second anniversary of our arrival in Madrid passed by recently, on January 5th. We only really intended to stay 6 months, as part of a more static continuation of our honeymoon travels; I was going to join the Diplomatic Corps and we were going to head back to the UK the following summer. This obviously never happened: I made it through to the last round but then fell at the final hurdle for not being diplomatic enough. Those that knew me well graciously pretended to be shocked.


It doesn't seem like we've been here two years ; in some ways it feels like we've been here hardly any time at all, in others like we've always lived here. After all it's the only home Rosie, fast approaching her 1st birthday, has known. Also, switching jobs and flats after 7 months was the equivalent of hitting F5/refresh and added a new sense of ...ummmm.... newness to our stay here. But a stay is all it is; as much as we like Madrid, and despite the good friends we've made here, it's not a permanent home for us. Without wanting to jinx anything, plans are afoot to move back to Bristol.
We'll have to change the blog's name.
Again.

Los Reyes Magicos - by Theo

The streets of Madrid today are largely empty except for queues at the bakeries and the sweet, perfumed smell of Roscon de los Reyes, the sweet, cream-filled, circular cake with candied fruit that is the traditional fare on January the 6th.

It's a national holiday in Spain and, for many youngsters, the most exciting day of the year. For, on January 6th, Los Reyes Magicos, the magic Kings, the Three Wise men, come, bearing gifts for well behaved youngsters and coal for naughty tykes. (Some bakeries even stock sweet coal, a black, honeycomb-like sweet!) For while kids here do know about Santa Claus, he's barely made a dent; none of my students get gifts from him. Here, it's all about Los Reyes, the only grumble being that as they arrive at the very end of Christmas there's little time for the children to enjoy their presents before school starts again (tomorrow). It's a family day, though last night there may well have been a trip out to watch one of the many Calbagatas (processions), either a local one in the barrio, or the huge, municipal parade down the Paseo de Castellano. We went last year, but it started a bit late for Rosie and I doubt she'd have got much from it.


However, the 3 Kings did come to Rosie and, seeing as it's a Spanish tradition, they brought her Spanish books. An inflatable book to play with in the bath, and a beautiful pop-up book called 'Rosita juega al escondite' ('Little Rosie plays hide and seek'). What's slightly disappointing is that both are translations, though the second one is excellently translated, as they've even managed to keep the rhyme and meter intact; if there are any locally produced children's books we have yet to find them.

Gratuitous cuteness By Kate

People who don't care a fig about other people's babies, please look away now.

This post is a shameless excuse to stick up a clip of Rosie showing off her 11 month-old cuteness. No witty observations or nuggets of news to share. Nothing remotely pithy, philosophical or controversial. It's just a baby doing something most babies and small children do at some point or another.

"If I hide my face, then you can't see me."

That's it. End of.

Enjoy.

Unless you're on Facebook. Sorry, but you need to go to blog for this one.

a surfeit of grapes - by Theo

Early in the 20th Century, around 1910 I think, there was a surfeit of grapes in Spain. Stuck with what to do with them, the grape-growers struck upon a plan - let's invent a tradition. They managed to convince the Spanish public that it would bring them good luck if they ate one grape for each chime of the clock at midnight on New Year's Eve. This proved popular and so this cunning marketing ploy became tradition.

With this in mind I went out to buy fruit. I didn't like the look of the white grapes on sale - a bit brown - so I got red ones. They came in bunches of twelve - genetic engineering or painstaking packing? Who knows. Anyway, upon my return Kate was taken aback by the size of the grapes, stating she'd never be able to fit them all in, so I was dispatched out again to buy some small ones, which I duly did. However, when our New Year's Eve guests, David and Nataly, arrived, we discovered we were way behind the curve on the grape front. They have bought canned grapes, twelve to a can, each one peeled and de-seeded. The Spanish elevate corner-cutting to an art form! So we found ourselves with a surfeit of grapes.In the end, after a rather long and large meal, I wasn't quite sure if any of us would fit them in! Rosie, not wanting to be left out, duly woke moments before the countdown began on Spanish Radio, so Kate had to forego her grape swallowing, sadly. The three of us however managed it, David and Nataly using the canned ones while I manned up and went for the big red ones. Kate returned in time for Prosecco and David and Nataly's initiation into Robert Burns ("Auld Lang Syne"). The fireworks went off in the street and 2011 arrived with a bang among friends, food and family. Perfect.