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...

Cats or Cars? - by Theo

What's a good analogy for having a young baby? Cats and Cars, is what I've come up with.

Babies sleep anywhere, any cradle, any chair, often in the most uncomfortable looking positions. Any stranger's lap will also do, apparently. In this sense, babies are just like cats, even to the extent of the sudden startles or strange mewlings they make while deeply asleep - extremely cute during the daytime, rather trying at night when you're trying to get some shut eye yourself. Sometimes they want to be cuddled, sometimes they don't - there's no second guessing them. They have this totally selfish, innocent integrity; they are out for no 1, and blow the rest of you. They make a mess in the house and feedings are unpredictable - after complaining about their hunger they occasionally turn their noses up at the proffered food. Like cats, they also scratch, which I hadn't realised - those little nails can wound! Biting soon to come, I imagine.

In another sense though, babies are just like cars. They need fuel, maintenance, cleaning and there's a seemingly never ending stream of paperwork to be completed. Plus there's the regular, nerve-wracking check-ups and mechanical examinations; you're pretty sure nothing is wrong, but even so you dread the worst, get seriously concerned when the senior mechanic... sorry doctor... starts pointing things out to a junior colleague and breath a huge sigh of relief when the words "all fine" are uttered. Like at Rosie's hip scan on Monday. Plus, as with car ownership, having a baby means you suddenly become fair game for everyone's two-pennies worth on how to care for it and what route to take. The amount of advice that comes the way of parents is astounding, confusing and contradictory - there is no consensus. Most of it we reject, some of it is clearly dangerous, a lot belongs to the rubbish-dump of bad medical thinking, but all of it taken together would be enough to make a less arrogant... sorry, confident, father doubt themselves and their instincts. Like the pediatrician yesterday telling us that carrying Rosie in a sling was bad for her. "How do you think parents carried babies before prams were invented?" was my riposte, to which she had no reply.

Of course, unlike cars, you can't choose your baby. Not that we'd change anything about our lovely little mini!