Hark who goes there – the day I mistook my daughter for a burglar

My daughter was making so much noise in her cot this morning I thought we had burglars.

I had just put her back to bed for her post-breakfast nap and decamped to the bathroom to finally have my shower and get ready for the day when I heard a banging noise.

Not a quiet, inoffensive, background-noise kind of banging but a real persistent thumping, demanding of my attention.

I always expect to hear some noise coming from my daughter's bedroom when I first put her in her cot. It is normally the sound of her moaning – probably at the injustice of me making sure she gets enough sleep – or chatting away to the colourful characters hanging down from her mobile – but this thumping noise made me stop in my tracks.

There I was clutching onto my toothbrush listening intently. Burglars or baby, burglars or baby, I was thinking. Thump, thump thump. I can't stress the force that appeared to be going into this noise and its loudness. Thump, thump, thump. Now let's think rationally about this. It's not going to be burglars. No, do not even think about creeping downstairs to check. No one's trying to kick the front door down. Thump, thump, thump. OK I'll just stick my head out the bathroom door and see if I can get a clearer idea where the noise is coming from.

Thump, thump, thump. Thump, thump, thump. Well at least that explains it. As soon as I stuck my head out onto the landing I could quite clearly hear the noise was coming from my daughter's bedroom and if I was not mistaken sounded very much like the sound of her cot banging against the wall. How on earth she was managing to wriggle around enough to make that clanging noise I have no idea but there we are, mystery solved.

This is not the first time both me and my husband have heard strange banging noises coming from upstairs whilst we are downstairs in the evening having put my daughter to bed. Sometimes it sounds like she is clambering out of her cot and making her way downstairs. We almost expect to see her little face peering over the bannisters, appealing with her eyes to be allowed to come back downstairs.

I imagine that one day we're going to end up re-enacting that hilarious scene from Roald Dahl's book Matilda when she hides a parrot up the chimney to scare her detestable parents. For anyone who is not aware of it, the Wormwood family are all sat around the television one evening when they hear sinister voices. They decide to investigate, certain burglars have broken in and proceed single file into the next room, each wielding a household object as a weapon, only to find a parrot in its cage wedged up the chimney-breast.

I have visions of me holding onto my husband's dressing gown cord as he edges slowly up the stairs brandishing a rolled up copy of Cycling Weekly – though if we ever do have intruders I do hope he arms himself with something a bit more substantial. We'll tiptoe our way into our daughter's bedroom dreading who we are going to find in there with her and there she will be, my daughter, sat up in bed having an in-depth conversation with her teddy bear, a big grin on her face and not a care in the world, and most significantly, not a burglar in sight.

If I have to clean that high-chair one more time...

You know how people come up with statistics such as you spend a certain percentage of your life sleeping, a certain percentage of your life commuting to work, a certain percentage queuing and so on.

I wonder if someone could come up with a statistic on how much of my life I am currently spending cleaning my daughter's high-chair after she has finished eating.

This is a task which is really getting on my wick. But as much as I want to stamp my foot and declare 'I'm not doing it anymore' there's really no two ways about it. How could I contemplate putting my daughter back into a filthy high-chair, smeared with the remains of many meals past? It's not an option, so I will just have to keep getting my rubber gloves out and plodding on.

It must take at least ten minutes after every meal to get the high-chair thoroughly clean. I do get a slight reprieve at breakfast as this tends to be the least messy meal as my daughter is normally too hungry to mess around.

But lunchtimes and teatimes are a different matter especially now I have bought into the theory of it being good for babies to explore their food, not just by eating it but by touching it. So in her little hands go into the bowl and down they splat onto the table of the high-chair She then proceeds to smear the puréed mixture all over the table top in what I have dubbed, to try and bring a bit of humour to the proceedings, her food painting sessions.

'What is that you're painting?' I'll cheerfully ask, through gritted teeth, 'a field of carrots?'. That's an extra five minutes of cleaning, I'll be mentally noting to myself.

I read once, on a website discussion board, just as I was starting down the path that is weaning my daughter, of how one mother felt, just as I do now, that she spent most of her life cleaning her child's high-chair and I think I scoffed.

At this point it was still early days and my daughter was only having a few spoons of purée at meal times and this rarely made a mess. Looking back now it's quite a miracle it didn't make a mess, but it didn't, and I couldn't comprehend how a child could get into such a mess that it would take such a long time to tidy up after them. Oh those innocent, carefree days. So much to learn.

We're experimenting with sandwiches now and I think there's whole slices of bread secreted in the nooks and crannies of that high-chair. I may be exaggerating somewhat there but I would like to know how it is possible to be under the impression you've thoroughly cleaned that chair only for next time you clean it to discover a pea down the side of it and you think to yourself, my daughter hasn't eaten peas for about two days. How can there be a pea just sitting there having alluded my industrious cleaning?

Oh the joys of cleaning the high-chair. And that's before you've even started on washing up the bowls and spoons, and cleaning the food off my daughter, and myself.

If you're happy and you know it clap your hands

My daughter has learnt to clap. I am over-joyed by this latest development. It may not be as monumental as crawling, standing or speaking first words but that isn't the point.

After months and months of trying to get her to clap her little hands together, inanely singing 'If you're happy and you know it clap your hands' and giving her a round of applause every time she finished all her lunch or tea, she has done it.

And I can take absolutely no credit for it.

My daughter chose to show off her new skill as her bedtime story was drawing to an end. Did she feel so moved by the fact Beauty agreed to marry the Beast that she had to show her appreciation, who knows, but clap her hands she did, minutes before lights out.

At first I don't think I quite registered what my daughter had just done. It really isn't the time of day you expect your 11-month-old baby to try out something new.

But she did it again and I declared to my husband, whose head was buried in the Big Book of Fairy Tales, she's clapping. It also took him a moment to realise before he said, in equally surprised a voice, 'Oh, she actually is'.

My daughter sat delighted between us, a big grin on her face, still clapping her hands. She seemed genuinely proud of her own achievement and her shining eyes seemed to be saying, look I've done it, I've done it.

So how did we celebrate this hugely-exciting milestone. We gave her a round of applause of course.

And that gave my daughter yet another opportunity to clap her hands too. What would people have thought if they had seen us, all three sat in a line on the bed, clapping our hands. I guess the first question would be how they got into the house.

My daughter clapping her hands is such a delightful thing to witness. Just the base of her palms hitting together, fingers flailed, making the tiniest of tapping noises.

I could have watched her clapping for the rest of the night. It seemed such a shame to have to put my clever little daughter to bed.

But I want a boy...

The news that right here in the UK pregnant women are aborting their unborn children because they are not their desired sex is truly sickening.

I actually feel so saddened by this that I was in two minds whether to even write about it as I wasn't sure I could write coherently.

I certainly can't be objective.

These women, and if their partners are complicit in it – and we'll assume they are – these men, should be treated as criminals because they are brutally taking a life for a frivolous reason.

To determine the sex of a child the foetus would have to be at least 12 weeks old for the gender to be detectable on a scan.

Blood tests can detect whether the unborn baby is male or female earlier but then that really is assuming these people are setting out to procreate for a specific gender from the beginning.

At best they have had the 12 week scan and thought, I don't want a boy/I don't want a girl, let's scrap that one and try again.

My choice of words there may seem flippant but this is exactly the attitude these people are exhibiting.

In this modern age people appear to think they can have what they want, when they want. But never did I wish to contemplate this attitude being taken so far. You hear of designer babies but this you associate with hidden labs in deepest America, not right here in Britain.

Don't these people realise that they are playing with human life here? As soon as the baby is conceived it is a little person in the making. Already everything is there to determine what he or she will look like, what their personality will be like, what their talents will be. To end this little life for no other reason than it is not the right sex – well, words fail me.

I find abortion difficult to stomach at the best of times. I feel there has to be a cast iron reason why it should ever be used. And what really staggers me is that still it is possible for a woman to have an abortion up until her baby is 24 weeks.

I remember reaching 24 weeks when pregnant with my daughter and actually reflecting on this very fact. At this point my daughter was moving around and kicking, reacting to different sounds and hiccuping. We already had an incredible bond and to think that at that stage in the pregnancy it would have been possible to get rid of her. Unthinkable.

An idea is being mooted that women should have a scan so they can see their baby before they have an abortion. I think on the back of this horrendous revelation this week, this idea should be given the green light.

The sliding scale

'OK, you can play with the doormat. Just don't put it in your mouth.'

It was with these words the reality of looking after a crawling, standing baby dawned on me. It is no longer a case of preventing my daughter from touching everything in the house – I'm not an octopus – but time to decide which items I am most keen to protect from inquisitive fingers and teeth. Our possessions are on a sliding scale of importance and I do wonder where it is going to stop.

When my daughter first started crawling I was desperate to prevent her from touching anything, which didn't resemble one of her toys. And at first I was winning. She only had a few select paths she would take across the room and I could predict where she was heading, whether the bookcase or the front door and get there first to ensure damage limitation. She would take a book out of the bookcase and I would put it back.

But now she's got all sorts of undercover routes like under the dining table, which she's definitely worked out give her free movement towards the totally out of bounds areas such as the cables from the laptop and printer and the floor length curtains up against the patio doors. These are complete no go areas and I am determined to defend them until the end.

In comparison, if she takes a book, or two or three, out of the bookcase now I think, that's OK, at least she's not pulling down the curtains. Even when she starts chewing on the coffee table I think better that than an electric cable.

As I write this I can't believe it has got to this point so soon but already I feel like I am chasing my daughter around all day and taking forbidden objects out of her hands. Her toys just don't

seem to hit the mark any more. You can surround her with them in the hope one will attract her attention for just a few minutes, but she'll just crawl over the top of them and head off to another corner of the room.

At the same time, this stage in my daughter's development is truly fascinating. I have watched her discover a little corner of paper on the carpet – from one of the books she was chewing earlier but the less said about that the better – and sit there poking at it, in total wonder. She'll pick it up and hold it out in front of her totally enthralled at her find.

Just someone give me a good talking to if it gets to the point I'm watching my daughter scaling the curtains with a proud smile on my face.

Gender Identity Disorder – more ludicrous labelling

As many people have done, I've read the story this week about the five-year-old boy who is now living as a girl, and despite my endeavours to try and remain open-minded, something about this story doesn't sit right with me.

For anyone who hasn't read it, little Zach Avery came to his mum at just three-years-old and told her he was a girl. At first his mother, Teresa Avery, believed it was a phase and left it like that but she says her son became increasingly distressed about being treated like a boy to the point they took him to see experts who diagnosed him with Gender Identity Disorder.

He now attends school as a girl with his long blonde hair in pigtails and the school have apparently been so supportive they have taken all the signs off the toilet doors to make them gender neutral.

According to Zach's mum, none of the children have given Zach a hard time over coming to school as a girl and everyone has been really supportive.

My first thought is how long will that last. Even if people are being supportive of Zach now, this will certainly change at secondary school when people are bullied for the slightest reason. His parents admit there could be problems with which toilets Zach uses later down the line and say perhaps he will have to use the staff toilets. But surely that doesn't suggest acceptance but instead makes it very clear that Zach is an exception to the rule and should be treated as such.

But what really concerns me is how Zach has been treated in this by both his parents and alleged experts.

At five-years-old Zach is still growing as a person and has not got a true sense of who he is. He may feel he wants to be a girl now but who knows how he will feel in a few years time. Society seems too quick these days to put people in little boxes. They have taken Zach's situation and slapped a label right on him of GID instead of just allowing him to be him – ironic for a family who wanted to escape the boy, girl labels.

At this tender age, in my view, the distinctions between boy and girl are actually fairly superficial. They are far too young to be thinking about which sex they are attracted to and an awareness of their bodies in this respect, so really the only differences between the genders are what clothes they wear and what toys they play with.

I don't think it is too much of a problem if a boy wants to put on a dress or play with dolls. In the same way I wouldn't have a problem if my daughter wanted to play with cars. Her favourite toy at the moment is a wooden train.

In most cases children are not even aware they are crossing any gender boundaries and are just enjoying what they like and this young age is the time to do it because the differences between boys and girls get more complex as children get older.

So I really don't think Zach's parents should have been worried. He may have been throwing tantrum after tantrum over the issue but young children will behave like this for all sorts of reasons. I can't help thinking his mum should have set a few ground rules such as he could wear a dress and play with girls' toys at home but he should dress as a boy for school. It does seem there was an element of pandering to his wishes and he is far too young to dictate to his parents.

But it is the experts who have diagnosed Zach with GID who really get to me. Can't they just leave these children to grow and develop in their own ways in their own times. It is only going to make these young children misfits, labelling them with a disorder when all they are doing is learning about themselves.

Maybe Zach will live his life as a woman when he is grown up but at least he would have reached that conclusion by himself. As a child with GID he is being pushed down a path which perhaps he may naturally have deferred from later on and in the same way, being treated as a girl by everyone now could distort how he may have turned out if there had been no pressure on which gender he was either way.

Say cheese

The family trip to the dentist didn't go down too well with my daughter.

This was her very first trip to the dentist to have her teeth examined and you could tell she wasn't keen as soon as we walked through the door and sat in the waiting room.

She had a good stare at the man sitting next to us and seemed to be reading his newspaper at one point but she wasn't her usual cheery self. I myself felt like I was waiting for my date with the executioner so I can hardly blame her.

I was quite surprised at how brief her check-up was. I decided it was better for her to go first ahead of her mummy and daddy.

She must have thought, aye up here's trouble, as the dentist approached her with his rubber gloved fingers and his strange all blue surgical outfit on. Immediately she turned away from him as I held her in my arms, her bottom lip starting to quiver. Once the dentist managed to get her to face him and have a look it took a matter of a few seconds as he checked to see which of her teeth had come through. The details were then entered into her own personal record and that was her first examination done.

My daughter has nine teeth already. She seems to have many more than a lot of babies we know of her age. We actually thought she only had eight teeth until a couple of days ago when we noticed one of the big molar teeth at the back of her mouth was poking through.

We must be the only parents in the world oblivious to their baby getting a new tooth. We have hardly had any trouble with our daughter and teething. She seems to take it all in her stride. More teeth to bite the furniture with, she must be thinking – excellent.

Me and my husband did discover, courtesy of the dentist, that we had been putting far too much toothpaste on the toothbrush. No wonder our daughter thinks its snack time whenever we put the toothbrush in her mouth. Very little brushing gets done and more chewing and sucking as my daughter has what she must think is her little twice daily minty treat.

The dentist said we should only be putting a tiny little film of toothpaste over the bristles. Not a pea sized amount then. Whoops. This must be because of the dangers of swallowing too much fluoride. I'll try not to dwell too much on the fact my daughter has probably consumed a whole tube of toothpaste during her lifetime so far. We live and we learn but quite how I'm going to get the message across to my daughter that toothpaste is not for eating I'm not sure, however small an amount we put on.

I do hope she allows us to brush her teeth a bit more at some point though because I sense she's not going to be keen on taking too many trips to the dentist. Not only did a strange man dressed up in some kind of crazy Smurf outfit poke around at her teeth but she didn't even get a sticker!

Call the Midwife

Sunday evenings won't be the same now Call the Midwife has come to an end.

For anyone who hasn't seen it – and if you haven't you've truly missed out – this breathtakingly-good programme follows the lives and fortunes of midwives and their patients during the 1950s.

The series boasts a top-notch cast from acting stalwarts Jenny Agguter and Pam Ferris to newcomer Jessica Raine who takes on the daunting task of shouldering the majority of the action as it is played out through the eyes of her character, Nurse Jenny Lee. And how could I not mention Miranda Hart as the aristocratic, bumbling but well-meaning 'Chummy'.

We are only given tentative glimpses into each of the midwives' back stories, leaving us wondering as they aid numerous parents in bringing new life into the world, what stories they harbour beneath their midwives' uniforms and nun's habits. Because, as I'd better explain, half the midwives are actually nuns and the midwives' house is also a convent.

But what we do learn is just how worldly-wise and accepting the nuns are. They are often the ones opening the eyes of the younger midwives.

There is something heart-warming about watching as a midwife peddles her bicycle along a cobbled 1950s street as young children scamper out of the way and mothers, bedecked in their housecoats, hang out the washing and rock their newborns in their prams.

This programme shows just how tough it was for many during this period as the midwives mainly serve women living in the poorest conditions – massive families crammed into tiny terraced houses, dull of damp and bugs.

We are shown the dangers of childbirth, the realities of having a premature baby in this era – chances were slim to none for survival – and the trauma of losing a baby, whether through it being taken away by the authorities, stolen or stillborn.

Underneath the feel-good Sunday night exterior, this programme is not afraid to cut close to the bone when it comes to raw emotion and there is not an area it is afraid to cover.

Who can forget the Spanish mother who had over ten children and went into premature labour with her latest child after falling over and hitting her head. The baby was so small, doctors were desperate to take the infant away to hospital but the mother refused. 'I am his hospital' she declared and so we follow her as she painstakingly feeds her baby milk through a straw. Flying in the face of doctors' advice her mother's love and care leads to her helping her baby put on much-needed weight and ultimately saves its life.

And I don't think I breathed throughout the scene where Miranda Hart's character delivers her first breeched baby. We were all with her I'm sure as, fighting her own terror, she calmly talked the mother through what was an extremely dangerous procedure to undertake outside a hospital, as I can't neglect to mention, most of these women were giving birth to their babies at home.

I don't think an episode has gone by without leaving me in tears but none more so than in the case of a young prostitute who falls pregnant. She is so in love with her baby even before it is born, because she has had such a life devoid of this emotion, and so when the baby is taken away from her she is driven mad by the loss of her child.

As Sister Evie says, losing a child is a form of madness for a mother, and as a new mother myself I can completely understand this.

This programme has come at just the right time for me. I don't think I would have got as much out of it before becoming a mother and it is a truly wonderful thing to now understand the incredible bond between mother and child. This programme has helped me appreciate even more what I've got and how as parents we should never take our children for granted.

Will university even be an option for my daughter's generation?

As the latest twist in the saga which is university tuition fees hit the headlines this week, it got me thinking about whether university will actually be a viable option for my daughter.

Not just because of the cost but because in my opinion the very essence of what a university should be has been irredeemably lost somewhere along the way.

I know it is very early to be even thinking about this as my daughter is barely 11 months old but it is an inevitable part of being a mother that you wonder what your child's future will hold.

Of course my daughter may not want to go to university and I would not force her. I would only advise her about the possible benefits if I could see it would be advantageous for the direction she was looking to take her life in.

But at the same time, I wonder whether going to university will even be an option for my daughter.

Universities as I knew them when I first attended some ten years ago no longer exist. So what will they be like when my daughter is weighing up her options?

I'm not even thinking about the rise in tuition fees as the main barrier. Of course it is a huge stumbling block to a lot of young people who will have to fork out £9,000 annually as of this year – and the plot thickens this week as business secretary Vince Cable has waved plans to impose a penalty on those students paying back their loans early. Why were they even considering such plans? The coalition government claims it was to prevent wealthier students paying back their loans before the 30 year repayment period was up, to avoid paying interest, but as consultation has found, it would be those people wanting to avoid huge debts, and not the wealthy, first in the queue to pay back their loans.

And it is this attitude on the part of the government of being desperate to appear as though they are creating a level playing field for everyone that, in my opinion, has destroyed universities. Universities were set up as places of study, for people who loved to learn for learning's sake and people studied good, solid subjects like English, History and Science.

It was like that when I attended a decade ago although admittedly I did go to a more traditional university. People weren't using their degrees as springboards into work. The most vocational it got was people studying Law or Medicine.

Today it is all about lukewarm courses like media studies which ironically ill prepare people for the reality of the workplace. These vocational courses do not compare to the good old fashioned subjects. They were set up to get more people to attend university with the view they would be guaranteed a job at the end of it.

It was the Labour government which pushed this through on the back of their aim of getting 50 per cent of school leavers into universities. Again this is a symptom of not wanting to be seen to exclude anyone.

There is nothing wrong with making distinctions between different areas of society. We don't all have to be identikit people with identikit opportunities. Some people are made for university and others are not. If they wanted to make it fairer, the government should have done more to help the highly-intelligent, less well off young people who were unable to go to university because they could not afford it.

Oh, what's that, they decided to raise the tuition fees instead. Typical.

So unless there is a complete shake-up of the university system that sees vocational subjects scrapped and a return to the traditional core subjects then I think my daughter's generation are better off out of it.

My daughter – the nosy parker

My daughter is the nosiest of nosy parkers living in nosy-ville. But she surpassed herself on a recent trip to Tesco.

Several months ago she developed a habit of starring at people. She would literally fix her sights on a poor innocent by-stander and stare and stare at them. Now for some people this is a treat. They will smile and say hello, even give her a little shake of the hand. However, for some people this can prove an extremely uncomfortable situation, particularly in lifts which is one of my daughter's favourite spots for a staring match.

When she fixes some people with her blue-eyed stare they simply do not know how to react. They don't appear to distinguish any difference between my daughter staring at them and any grown adult. Most people in this category will simply keep their heads down and try and ignore my daughter. The thing is she doesn't give up that easily and I think it leaves some people praying the lift will arrive at their floor so they can get out. I guess it takes all sorts.

But as I was saying, at Tesco recently my daughter went above and beyond what even I have grown to expect of her. We were waiting in the checkout queue - my daughter sat in the little seat in the trolley, me with my eye on the clock, when another mother and daughter joined the queue at the neighbouring checkout. My daughter immediately fixed her eyes on this little girl who was about three or four-years-old I would estimate – certainly considerably older than my daughter – and she smiled. This was a new move in itself as normally she accompanies her beady-eyes with an open-mouthed gawp. The other little girl was not so sure about this new attention and kept looking away even after encouragement from her mum to say hello. In fact the little girl seemed to be so put out that she started squirming in her own trolley seat to the point her mum decided to lift her out and put her on the ground.

Now this is the moment I couldn't quite believe I was witnessing. My daughter was obviously getting a bit frustrated at being ignored so she reached right over in her seat so she was practically hanging out of one side of the trolley and put out her hand to grab the little girl. Maybe you had to be there but I could not believe it. I had never seen my daughter behave like that before.

And just in case we hadn't had enough entertainment in Tesco that day, my daughter decided to round the visit off with yet another classic. As I was frantically trying to pack all our shopping away into carrier bags at the checkout I noticed my daughter had selected her next victim. A poor innocent old man who was waiting by the window, possibly for his wife, minding a trolley load of shopping.

This old man appeared to be quite perplexed about why my daughter was staring at him because he kept checking the bottom of his shoe. I was far too busy to pause and explain to him that it wasn't that my daughter was staring at him for any particular reason, that I knew of, just simply because he existed but I think that could have proved an awkward conversation anyway.

So I just had to leave him suffering from a severe case of paranoia while my daughter stared and stared away. He probably asked his wife when she turned up whether he had something on his face.

Worries, worries, go away

I think I started to enjoy being a mum when my daughter was about three months old. Now, it's not as bad as it sounds. I loved my daughter from the moment I set eyes on her and never regretted becoming a mum for a moment. It was just that up until my daughter was three months old, I found I was so consumed by worry and concern I was unable to enjoy it.

This worry centred around keeping my daughter alive. I'm not being flippant. I mean this is what you do when they're infants isn't it. It's all about the very basics – feeding them, changing them, bathing them and getting them to sleep. All of these things threw up huge concerns from one time to another but it was the feeding that consumed my brain 24-7. Even when I was asleep part of me was still on high alert for her crying out to be fed. As soon as I heard the first whimper I'd be bolt upright in bed calling to my slumbering husband, 'she's awake, she's awake, get her out of her crib, get her out quick, let me feed her', as though with a second's delay a major disaster would ensue.

My life was centred around these feeds. I was breastfeeding so it was all about me and I felt the pressure severely.

I'm a huge advocate of breastfeeding and I'd never advise anyone to bottle feed a baby for an easy life. At the same time I won't get on my soap box and preach about the benefits of breastfeeding because who am I to say but I will just mention that to see your baby grow big and strong all on the milk you have produced in your own body is truly incredible, but I didn't sit back and reflect on it in that way for a long time – as I say, about three months.

With no idea how much milk my daughter was consuming and so many conflicting ideas in books about how long she should be spending feeding – many significantly longer that my daughter would spend nursing – I was petrified, and I mean petrified, she wasn't getting enough, and therefore wouldn't be putting on enough weight.

I would go along to those fortnightly weighings at the children's centre in the early days with a stomach full of butterflies. I felt like I was heading off to sit a major exam. Please let me pass I would chant in my head. Terrified I would lower my daughter onto the scales and watch the digital numbers flicker up, praying they would come to rest at the weight I'd meticulously calculated beforehand she should be that week.

And you know every time she hit that weight – in fact she usually exceeded it. But every time I'd still panic. I'd say to the health visitor when she asked me if I had any concerns, 'I worry she's not getting enough milk', and they would always say as long as she was putting on the weight and she was happy and content I didn't need to worry, I could tick the box on both counts but still I worried.

I think it was after one particular weighing session – they were monthly by now – that I felt the weight of concern lift off my shoulders. I can't pinpoint exactly what was different. The health visitor again reassured me all was well and I guess this time I was ready to believe her. I also think I was tired of worrying, worrying, as well, for no reason.

Sometimes I think perhaps I wasted some precious weeks there where I was so worried I couldn't fully appreciate what I had got – a beautiful, healthy and, ironically, chubby – daughter. But I don't think I'd go back and change it even if I could because I think that period of time was all about adjusting to my new role as a mother and when I was feeling at my lowest ebb it was all borne out of the incredible love I had, and still have, for my daughter and wanting to do a good job.

Of course I still worry about her and still wonder sometimes if she's getting enough to eat but I have learnt not to let the worry take over and stop me enjoying this wonderful experience of being a mum.

Computer games are more creative than reading?

Playwright Lucy Prebble has said this week that computer games are more creative than reading. Is this woman insane?

I'd quite like to leave this post there. In fact if I had a choice I'd say, 'this woman is insane' and leave it like that but in the interests of fair play and to prevent a lawsuit I'll explore this matter further.

Ms Prebble, who is apparently best known as the writer of financial satire Enron and also Secret Diary of a Call Girl, has been quoted in the media as saying playing computer games requires more 'involvement and creative input than reading a book'.

In my opinion there is nothing more creative than reading. It allows all ages to take the printed word off the page and conjure up their own worlds in their minds. They can build up what the characters look like, what they sound like and start imagining what could possibly come next in the story.

Ms Prebble argues that reading is a passive activity and considering she is a writer herself I find it hard to fathom how she has come to this conclusion. It is not, as she seems to be suggesting, just reading the text on the page.

Its impact runs much deeper than that to the point as a reader it is possible to become completely wrapped up in a book both physically and emotionally. You may laugh out loud, cry tears of sadness, curl up into a ball in terror or grit your teeth in suspense.

Characters can become your best friends, or worst enemies. The best novels have us dying to know what happens next. They can consume our minds even when we aren't reading them and once finished their effect can last for weeks or a lifetime.

That's before we even contemplate the educational value of reading in terms of expanding a child's vocabulary and the mind. Reading does not have to finish once the book is closed.

Ms Prebble says the negative perceptions of gaming come from a middle class terror of bringing up fat children and no one has ever lost weight reading.

The thing is, children are so readily turning to computer games these days and less and less children are reading. I'm sure some youngsters believe Harry Potter was a film first and have never heard of the books.

So if Ms Prebble wants to grab a slice of the headlines, as a writer herself shouldn't she be championing her own art rather than putting out a message which is only going to add to parents' difficulties of getting their children to read?

Dada Dada look I'm standing

This has been the weekend for firsts. Not only has my daughter said Dada for the first time, adding to her steadily expanding vocabulary of Mama and yum yum alongside the usual ba ba, br br, na na babble, but she has finally managed to pull herself up into a standing position after several weeks of trying.

And I can't help but think this is one in the eye for the medical professionals who devised the nine month developmental questionnaire.

This questionnaire dropped through the letterbox when my daughter was eight months old giving me a month of irritation. It suggested that all babies should have hit a number of ludicrous developmental milestones before they reached the age of nine months.

Not only did they need to be speaking three words – luckily my daughter already had Mama under her belt and I considered this advanced so what kind of baby was saying three different things – but they were pretty much expecting babies to have taken their first steps. Not only was there a tick box for standing while being held up, but standing up holding onto a chair or rail, taking a few steps whilst holding onto something and bending down from a standing position to pick something up.

My daughter only managed to sit up unassisted when she was almost eight months old and when this questionnaire arrived on the doormat the concept of even putting her feet on the ground when I held her up was an alien one.

Over the next month she only ever put her feet down about fifty per cent of the time, so standing whilst holding a chair and taking a few steps seemed light years away.

In myself I wasn't actually concerned about this because I was rational enough to see that all babies develop at different stages. I read somewhere that it is not until children are three-years-old that they should be on a par in terms of reaching the same landmarks. Before then, they are all still developing at different rates.

I was annoyed however that this piece of paper had put me in the position of having to consider where my daughter was on any kind of development chart, and as a knock on effect, having to compare her to other babies.

Helping your baby learn and grow into a little person is more than ticking boxes on a chart. In my opinion there are more important things when a baby is under the age of one than learning to walk.

I wouldn't swap my highly perceptive, intentionally comical and endearingly loving daughter for a baby last seen tearing towards the door on its two little feet, without a thought in its head.

At the nine month check I said to the health visitor I felt the questionnaire had been far too optimistic in the feasible development a baby could have achieved by this age and she agreed but still had to fill in all the paper work stating my daughter's feet weren't quite weight baring and to follow it up in two months time.

But while I was aggravated at this I was still content in my belief that all babies develop at different rates and it was just a matter of time before my daughter would be achieving all these landmark developments and I'd be left reminiscing after that little infant I bought home from the hospital in my arms.

The early days are too precious to wish to hurry them on for the sake of allowing a health visitor to tick a box on a questionnaire.

And for my next trick...

My daughter has discovered the bookcase. More specifically she has discovered the books, more specifically than that she has discovered the theatre programmes and even more specifically she has found the theatre programme for 'Wicked'.

At every opportunity she crawls her way over to the bookcase and tests out each of the books on the bottom shelf to see which is most likely to give way and once she has ascertained the weakest link, as it were, she pulls the book out and if she's lucky, several will come out at once.

She is particularly interested in the theatre programmes, which had been stored there for prosperity in the hope they could be kept in pristine condition as reminders of the shows and plays we had

seen. No chance of that now.

It is these programmes which appear to be just the right size for a spot of shaking around, screwing up and chewing at the corners.

And it is the 'Wicked' programme which is getting most of this attention.

The interesting thing is my daughter was in attendance at that production when we saw it in London. I was pregnant with her at the time. I'm not suggesting for a moment that she knows she was there and is now perusing the programme to find out a bit more - though just imagine if she was.. .But I am saying it is a nice co-incidence that it is this programme which she likes best.

I remember going to see that show. I have to say I have never wished for a show to be over so quickly. This has got nothing to do with the performance itself. It was very good and worthy of its rave reviews but sitting there five months pregnant in a theatre whose air conditioning appeared to either have packed in or was certainly having some kind of off day was not much fun.

Then there was the toilet queue at the interval, running the whole length of the theatre. I remember standing at the back of the queue crying inside as my daughter pushed down on my bursting bladder. Throughout my pregnancy I never wanted any one to treat me with kid gloves but on this occasion I was thinking, someone please notice my situation and let me go to the front of the queue.

I couldn't believe my ears when I heard a lady's voice say, 'I really think you should go straight to the front. No one's going to mind'. I looked round to see who my saviour could be and my heart dropped. 'Oh no, I don't mind waiting,' said the heavily pregnant woman behind me who it turned out had been addressed instead of me. She looked so far gone she could have given birth right there and then in the theatre. If I had been her I would have raced – well waddled - to the front of that queue before anyone could stop me. But there we both ended up waiting with the rest of them.

So my daughter as you chew on that Wicked programme perhaps you could spare a thought for what I went through whilst I was carrying you. Would that be asking too much...?!

What a whopper!

The biggest baby ever born in China has weighed in at an eye-watering 15.52lb.

Giving birth to such a gigantic baby beggars belief but what really made me laugh was the father's comments to the press.

The Daily Mail's version of the story leads in on how the baby's dad, Han Jingang, was thrilled at the arrival of his son, Chun Chun, in the Year of the Dragon.

I immediately thought, well it's great you're thrilled pal, I'm sure your partner may feel slightly differently about the situation right now. I'm not saying 29-year-old Wang Yujuan is not happy at the birth of her baby – that would be ridiculous – but as a mother you would certainly be feeling a bit taken aback when the midwife says 'here's your baby son' before plonking what looks to all intents and purposes like a toddler down on your chest.

As the father jumps up and down pumping the air and declaring 'the Year of the Dragon, the Year of the Dragon' surely the mother will have been thinking, I couldn't care less if it were born in the Year of the Dragon, the Year of the Rat or the Year of the Rhinoceros, those baby gros aren't going to fit. (Just to be clear I am by no means belittling the Chinese culture as I know how much store they put in what animal they are born under.)

The father is then quoted as saying, 'my wife was not different from other pregnant women. She ate and drank normally as she should. But she's given birth to such a big, fat son'.

Touching, Well at least he's not afraid to be honest or perhaps his comments were a bit lost in translation.

In actual fact it must be quite a comfort to have a larger baby in some senses as it takes away some of that initial vulnerability when they look so scarily small and fragile.

The mother, who it is reported by some media outlets had a caesarean section – and you would jolly well hope so because I'm not sure otherwise how she would have pushed that baby out – said she sensed her baby was going to be 'something special'.

She already has a six-year-old daughter who was born weighing eight pounds and she said throughout her pregnancy with her son she felt far more 'clumsy' than she did when pregnant before. She also said her belly looked much bigger – well it would have done unless she was storing part of the baby down her legs – and she estimated the baby would be between 10 and 11 pounds. Well she was slightly out there, even though her predictions were certainly along the lines of a big baby. I guess you would never begin to imagine you were carrying a 15 pound baby.

It's fascinating what causes mothers to have different sized babies. From what I have

seen there seems to be no rules behind it. The tiniest women have big babies and large women can have small babies. It makes sense that mothers who make sure they eat healthily and well during their pregnancy have babies of a decent weight but what can this Chinese mother have been eating, unconsciously, to have produced such a gigantic baby – a tin of spinach a day?!

Should living a 'wretched life' make it acceptable to treat your children cruelly?

The story in the news this week of a mother who got drunk with her 11-year-old son is proof that some people are not fit to have children.

According to reports, the mother and son were found staggering around the streets in Bransholme, Hull. The 11-year-old boy was so drunk he was twice over the legal drink drive limit. The mother told onlookers they always got drunk together.

If somehow I have been living in a parallel universe and in the real world this kind of behaviour has become acceptable, I'm going to continue living in my bubble.

'Bad parenting' does not even begin to sum up the severity of this situation. Child abuse would be closer to the mark.

The mother, who has to remain anonymous to protect the identity of her child – though I wish there was some way she could be named and shamed without exposing her son to the inevitable fallout – has been charged with child cruelty. However, she has escaped prison.

The defence claimed mitigating circumstances because the mother has had a 'wretched life'. She has instead received a 12-month community and supervision order designed to tackle her problems.

Perhaps I should feel more sympathy towards this woman as we do not know what she has suffered but I have to say, if this woman is so troubled how and why is she bringing a child into this world? As she has proved, she is unable to look after him responsibly.

It is not inevitable that because someone has suffered in life they will go on to treat their own children despicably. People suffer and can still be loving parents because they do not want their own children to go through what they went through. So therefore, is the fact she has suffered a 'wretched life' any kind of defence?

Having children is one of the few things in theory anyone is free to do, whoever and whatever they are. And while it would be a draconian world that put any restrictions on who could have offspring, would it be too much to ask for people to consider whether they are fully up to the task before embarking on it?

If a child cannot count on his own mother to look after him and protect him from harm, who can he count on?

To even see an 11-year-old drunk in the street would be shocking. He was barely able to stand and ended up collapsing and vomiting before bursting into tears. It breaks your heart break to even think about it. So what kind of woman can be so out of touch with their maternal instinct, she can not only witness this on a regular basis but be the cause of it?

The boy has been taken away from his mother and they are no longer in contact, which is some justice but what kind of future does he have ahead of him now? Is he destined for the same 'wretched life' his mother has lived?

A Whole New World

So the safety gates are up, the plug sockets are covered, as are the corners of the tables, and just in time as my daughter is well and truly on the move.

In the space of a week she has gone from tentatively crawling the distance of a metre or two, to crawling from one room to another with ease. It has been incredible to watch, as not only has she increased the distance she can travel but the speed of her crawl has gone up at a rate of knots.

I knew I was in trouble last week when I put her down on the bedroom floor and quickly dashed across the landing into the bathroom and looked behind to see her following me. I had a blind panic when I saw the gaping drop which is the stairs yawning across the distance between us and dashed to pick her up, taken aback at which a close call that could have been. Oh the joys of being a first time parent. That was a scary lesson learnt right there. Needless to say the first safety gate went up at the top of the stairs.

It is already quite usual for me to move from one room to the next and for my daughter to follow me. There she will be at the gate which separates the living room from the kitchen, sat up on her knees and holding onto the bars calling out to me. I defy you not to laugh.

It must be amazing for my daughter, who up to now has been completely reliant on being picked up and carried around, or rolling, to get any where. Now she can get from room to room completely on her own. A whole new world has opened up to her.

There has always been no bounds to her curiosity and now my daughter has the ability to get around and go up and touch what ever object has attracted her attention, there really is no stopping her. She has settled on a few favourite spots already. One is by the front door where her shoes are kept. She will quite happily sit there chewing a shoe and if she's lucky someone may just open the front door whilst she's sitting there so she can catch a sneaky glimpse of what's going on outside. On one occasion when my husband opened the door she had her hand out on the cold concrete path before he could blink. A second more and she would have crawled right outdoors. Her other favourite spots are behind the sofa and and sat on the floor by her high-chair as she is fascinated by the pictures on her splash mat.

My daughter is loving every moment of her new found mobility. She can't seem to sit still. Just when you think she's content sitting quietly with her toys she will get up on all fours and set off at lightening speed, babbling away excitedly as she goes.

My daughter and the snow

My daughter saw her first snow at the weekend. Her initial reaction was lukewarm at best. The first flakes started to fall as we journeyed home in the car after a visit to granny and grandad's house.

The snowy spectacle proved so entertaining, my daughter fell asleep.

As I negotiated the steadily whitening country road back to our house, the snow falling ever thicker, my daughter slumbered on.

Even when I carried her back into the house she seemed unperturbed as the cold icy drops settled, rather appropriately, on her polar bear snow suit.

It was later when I picked her up to show her the garden from the upstairs window that she seemed to realise there was something different about the outside world.

She stared wide-eyed at the garden, which by now had been dusted in a fair covering of white, before bursting into a string of excited babble, sounding very much if my ears did not deceive me, like 'ooh' and 'ahh', and bouncing up and down in my arms all the while.

So that was my daughter's first encounter with the snow.

The next day my husband and me took our daughter to the park to see the ducks as the snow still lay thick around us.

She seemed perfectly content taking in her new surroundings with a regal air as my husband put his back into heaving the pushchair through the snow, the wheels looking as though they would buckle at any moment.

My daughter definitely sensed something unusual was going on when we got to the water's edge and she saw the ducks and geese walking across the top of the water rather than swimming in it as usual. A lot of 'oohs' and 'ahhs' issued from her mouth then.

However, she seemed most interested when a drip of water plopped down onto the arm of her coat from a thawing tree. She seemed fascinated by this splodge of dark on her sleeve and kept prodding at it with her finger.

What can you say? It's amazing how accepting of change babies can be. I guess they live in a world of constant change and development where everything is equally astonishing and new and so waking up to see their surroundings dusted in white is just one of many discoveries, which after an initial bout of excitement are just filed away to allow them to move onto the next marvel, like a drip of water on a coat sleeve.

The cotton wool generation

An image of a mother rock climbing with her two-year-old daughter has been released into the media this week. The child is pictured strapped to the back of the mum who is wearing a helmet while her daughter isn't. The mother claims her daughter was at no risk.

So this really leads onto the debate of whether as parents we should be wrapping our children up in cotton wool and preventing them from getting into danger or whether we should allow our children to make their own mistakes and reap the consequences whether for good or bad.

As a first-time mum I guess I need to decide where I stand on this debate, especially as my daughter is becoming more and more mobile by the day and investigating her world around her. And without being accused of sitting on the fence – a health and safety risk in itself – I think it is all about balance.

My own mum readily admits she was very wary of me, and my brother, getting into any scrapes as children. We were warned from doing the simplest of activities like walking along the top of a small wall. I have memories of walking along the top of walls and I even remember taking my mum to the village green to show her how I had learnt to climb to the top of the tallest tree with my friends. She must have been having a heart attack inside as I waved from the highest branch, 'look at me'. But at the same time I cannot stress how much as an adult I enjoy having my feet firmly on solid ground. I certainly wouldn't do anything adventurous such as bungee jumping or sky diving. Even going to a theme park for the day and going on the rides is my idea of hell and perhaps that has got a lot to do with my mum's attitude to risks when I was a child.

At the same time the world has gone health and safety mad. Parents now feel they must stop their children from doing anything which poses the slightest danger. You see youngsters out on their tiny scooters or their bikes with stabilisers so shrouded in elbow and knee pads its a surprise they can move. I personally believe a helmet is very important as serious injuries can occur from hitting a little head on concrete – far more than a kiss and a cuddle is ever going to resolve – but sending a child out as though they are about to go into battle not scoot down the road in sight of their parents is ludicrous.

The same seems to be occurring in schools. School trips have become almost a thing of the past due to the number of health and safety checks that need to be made and forms to be signed before the children can venture outside the school's boundaries.

This surely only spreads the message to children that the world is a scary and dangerous place. We need to allow children to be children and make their own mistakes in life. They do need to bump their heads and graze their knees at an early age so they can make their own risk assessments in later life.

The scary thing is this new generation of children who have been wrapped up in cotton wool are going to grow up. Society has developed and progressed thanks to people who have been prepared to take risks. As they say 'fortune favours the brave'. I do wonder what the future of this country will hold when our current generation of bubble-wrapped children are the ones responsible for progress.

But I don't think for the country to move on children need to be put in the line of danger and taken out on pursuits such as rock climbing. I do think that they need to be given clear boundaries of what not to do and where not to go, for example be told the dangers of roads, but they should be allowed to explore thoroughly within those designated boundaries without intervention.

What do you think?

Vitamin D supplements – scaremongering or sound advice?

So now we are being told we must give our children vitamin D supplements from birth.

Many of us are going to require a time machine in order to administer that to our babies and young children.

The problem is as parents we are continually bombarded with information about what we should or should not be doing for the benefit of our child, to the point that in order to maintain any level of sanity we have to actually close off our ears to most of this information and make our own decisions on what we think is best for our children.

This was my first instinct on hearing on the news many doctors were urging parents to supplement their children with vitamin D – yet another case of scaremongering.

Surely, as in most of these cases, as long as you know your child is getting a healthy and balanced diet, and in this case, getting plenty of sunlight by getting out and about in the fresh air every day, then surely we shouldn't all be charging down to our local chemist to get hold of our vitamin D supplements.

But at the same time, this piece of health advice is slightly harder to shake off than many others we have had thrust upon us in recent times. When you start hearing terms such as rickets being mentioned in the same breath as vitamin D deficiency then it is hard to stop the alarm bells going off in our heads.

This immediately conjures up images of a Victorian era with young children with their legs in splints and dying in infant hood. It is shocking to think we are still having to consider the possibility of children in the modern age getting such a disease.

The reason I do have some concerns is that children these days do tend to spend a lot of time indoors playing video games and watching the TV and are not out and about in the fresh air and thus exposing themselves to the healthy benefits of sunlight. If there is a generation that could be in danger of not obtaining enough of the required vitamins to ensure good bone development and fend off life-threatening diseases such as heart conditions and cancers in old age then this is the generation. FitnessMagazine.com

I was surprised that in the report on the news there was no mention that doctors felt encouraging youngsters to get out and about was a good antidote to counter the vitamin D deficiency in our children. Instead the solution seemed to be head straight for the vitamin bottle.

If the advice had been for children to get more fresh air I think I would have felt more comfortable with that as that is just common-sense.

Of course it is serious if children are lacking vitamin D but it has not been made clear whether all children are genuinely at risk of having low reserves of this vitamin or whether health experts are generalising across the board to cover themselves.

My mother's instinct is telling me, and I am reiterating here, that as long as my child is getting a healthy, balanced diet, and gets out in the fresh air every day, then they should be getting enough vitamin D naturally.

And the problem is in a few months time we will probably be told that giving babies too much vitamin D is bad for them.
All Medigap plans

Off in a blaze of biscuit crumbs and baby oil - my daughter has started to crawl

And I know this very small but very significant development in her life is going to change things around here forever.

It is a milestone I have been awaiting with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.

There will be no more leaving her in front of the television with her toys for a few moments, while I do those reasonably essential things like go to the toilet or get a drink. Not unless I want to come back to find her in a completely different part of the room – or worse – a different room altogether. Oh that hard and unfriendly kitchen floor.

Ours is soon to become a world of playpens and stair gates.

And while she is only moving short distances now, her inquisitiveness is bound to drive her on to perfect her crawling ability all too soon.

Is it a bird, is it a plane, no it's my daughter making for the door.

A few months ago she realised she could get around the place by the power of the roll. By this I mean that once she had mastered rolling over once in one direction she realised she could cover even more distance by stringing together two of these rolls, and then three, in any direction she chose.

Already I have come back into the room to find on first sight she has completely vanished, discovering her after a moment of blind panic hidden in the alcove under the stairs.

And I know this is only a taster for what is to come now she can crawl.

I've watched my daughter slowly get to this point. At around three or four months I watched with bated breath as she first desperately tried to roll herself onto her front. Every effort went into her raising one side of her body just centimetres off the ground before she collapsed exhausted, having got nowhere.

I think when she finally rolled over I clapped and cheered so loud I made her cry. Over the next few months she got to grips with the aforementioned double and triple rolls. Then the next landmark came at nine months old on Christmas Day.

Obviously sensing this was a special day, she chose it to get up on all fours for the first time. Over the last month she hasn't been able to get enough of pulling herself up into this position and rocking backwards and forwards, before collapsing down onto her tummy to look around and see how far she has progressed. You could almost see the disappointment on her face when she realised she was still in exactly the same spot she started in.

Then a month on, it is like a light bulb has gone off in her head. “If I just move this hand, then this knee, then this hand – hang on a minute, I'm on the move, I'm away – I'm tired now I think I'll just rest my head on the carpet...”

But it won't be long, I think to myself, it won't be long before she masters long distance crawling and I'm left to give chase.