You must tell the mums! Tell them! I was urged by our oh-so-hippy ex-GP. (He now runs the village farmers’ market and is gung-ho about unpasteurised milk and passionate about the village pig project.) I’m not entirely certain which mums he means, given that surely anybody who was interested would be quite capable of googling – these days there is an enormous array of websites dedicated to the black art of what I refuse to call babywearing – or approaching me on the street; an event that occurs about once every 3 weeks. (In between I am approached by elderly people who wish I would carry them.)

With hindsight, I should have started selling baby slings when M was tiny: if only a fraction of the people who enquired actually went on to buy one from me I’d still be well ahead. There just weren’t the options then; these days there are millions of different sling designs and manufacturers and websites. Unlike some dedicated shoppers, I only have four slings, and one other passed briefly through my hands before being sold on. The one in this photo was our first; bought in Japan (and look, here is baby Maggie in it), it is an Israeli-design stretchy wrap. A sling of some sort was essential in Tokyo, where subway stations often had two or three flights of stairs and no lift (and I learnt from bitter experience that you could stand at the bottom of a flight of stairs looking plaintively at your buggy for a really long time before anybody offered to help.) It’s just about 6 metres of black jersey with a pocket at the front and rings to fasten the ends together. Cameron’s sling of choice, as it is fast and easy to put on; my favourite for a tiny baby. The stretch means you can put the carrier on first then put the baby in – so great for a newborn who might pop up and down over the course of a day – but also makes it less supportive so it isn’t so good once baby is heavy.

My current favourite for Jenny is a didymos, a woven wrap (no photos of this one yet but it is stylishly black and silver). I wrap it in almost the same way as the stretchy, but around the baby as it doesn’t stretch to accommodate. I like it very much but wish it too had rings to fasten as I end up with a bulky knot at the back when I tie it.

Number three is a maya wrap, which I have yet to put Jenny in. I did use it for a newborn Tamsin but it really comes into its own for older babies and younger toddlers; I keep it in the back of the car, or carry it if we go for a walk, as it is so easy to just pop them in and out. I dislike the one-shoulderedness of it and am aware you should swap sides but like my handbag only really feel happy with it over the right side.

I’ve just come to number four and realised with a blush that actually we seem to have five. Blame baby brain even if it no longer officially exists. My fourth style of sling is a meitai, basically a square of fabric with four strap attached to the four corners (you can get meitais with wrap-style straps, padded straps, unpadded straps, head rests, rain covers… mine is just basic.) It’s pretty, in pink spotty satin, and I like it best to put babies on my back. In principle one can wrap onto one’s back but I don’t find it that comfortable; the meitai just feels right. (This is Tamsin again.)

(Lastly, I have a second woven wrap; it’s a turquoise and silver gauze which is supposedly cool for summer but was fundamentally bought because it is pretty. The only photo I have of this one – the curse of being the family photographer – is appallingly hippy.)

We have a new car, so can all leave the house simultaneously and not in convoy. It is a Toyota so may well be recalled for weirdy accelerator issues:  it will have to go back anyway as they have not fitted the reverse parky beepy things that we requested. Not sure if it is the fault of the lease company or Toyota; frankly I don’t much care as long as it is resolved before I reverse into something. Cameron sold his at the weekend and is now driving my old one, muttering under his breath about the yogurt and crumbs and mud and general unpleasantness of it: he tried to get it valeted on Sunday but was turned away from two places. We are not sure if they were scared by the state of it or just about to close.

Jenny** is growing and growing and I know this is a good thing and what babies are supposed to do yet couldn’t help feeling sad as I realised I had to stop cramming her little feet into newborn-sized babygros and get out the next size. It is a novelty for me to have a big baby (she’s not huge, just biggish) after the other two tots, and she is such a happy content sweet thing with bright eyes and a double chin. Maggie is reading, properly – just discovering the Secret Seven and really not that interested in being read to or even in reading out loud but just wants to be left in peace with her nose stuck in. Just like her mum. She’s a sensitive soul who was upset when Granny went home. Tamsin is, well, three, and didn’t give a monkeys. Very three. She’s enjoying preschool but still refuses to speak there (but will whisper, with some sort of 3-year-old logic) and is great at jigsaws -oh, and she has started ballet lessons which she loves.

* Essential = one hot meal a day, clean plates to eat it from, clean clothes.
**Links are to photos

All sorts of lapsed bloggers have been crawling out from the woodwork and behind stones this Christmas period. I feel inspired to join. If anybody out there isn’t on FB/my text list/the grapevine and is thus unaware, baby Jenny joined us on December 20th (just: 1.11 am). I may be a biased and rose-tinted mum – and it may be early days – but she’s a pretty perfect baby and her big sisters are thrilled. More photos can be found here, including one of M&T dragged from their beds to meet the new arrival, and for those of you who enjoy such entertainment her birth story will follow just as soon as I can bear to put her down for long enough (and as soon as I find time without a babe-in-arms that isn’t immediately claimed by another child or some essential household task. Or sleep.) All I will say for now is that independent midwives rock, and are worth every single penny.

Her first couple of days of life were spent on the sofa snoozing and feeding (she is a champ and has gained a lb already, at 10 days old) and generally getting over the whole pushing out a baby at way past one’s bedtime thing (didn’t get to bed until after 3 the night she arrived). My favourite event was surprising Sara, in whose house we had been at 5 pm on Saturday (no baby): her face was a picture when she walked into our living room at 10 am on Sunday to find a whole new human being had arrived overnight! On day 3, we finally managed to put up the Christmas tree and were visited by a different midwife; this one had wondered the day before J arrived if it would be worth trying a wee bit of homeopathy: we had discussed whether it would work if you didn’t believe in it. She maintains it clearly does (I think she’d have arrived regardless). Day 4 my milk arrived – I need say no more for anybody who has been through it – as did my parents.

A pleasant if necessarily quiet Christmas: mum and dad came and cooked goose and trimmings (and now they have gone I can put selected leftovers in the bin but shh don’t tell!) and occupied M & T with games and crafts. They (the girls) had clearly absorbed all the propaganda about santa not coming if one didn’t go straight to sleep: when I went up to tuck them in and fill their stockings, I found two girls lying perfectly straight under completely undisturbed duvets, clearly neither of whom had twitched a single muscle since bedtime. Both slept until 745 which was quite a present for us, too. [Aside: at a week old I find it hard to evaluate whether J is "good", but I am getting a lot more sleep now than when I was pregnant, which probably means she is. I was asked today whether she was sleeping through, which struck me as a bit nuts.]

J and I had our first outing yesterday – her first ever trip outside the house, my first venture beyond the garden shed for 10 days. Lovely to get walking not waddling and I so enjoyed getting the baby sling back out. Today was busy with the health visitor (a profession of which I have not been given cause to revise my opinion), a trip to the hospital for J’s hearing test (all clear) and a new tumbledryer as mine picked the perfect time to break down. J has experienced three short car rides so far and has screamed through them all which does not bode well for next week when we must go to Surrey.

I haven’t set foot on the allotment since being kicked off: am going to have to stop being sad and embarrassed and get myself down there. There’s a sandpit and two raised beds (and some lovely veg, and a rhubarb crown that I know they have been coveting) that I will not leave for the next person. It’s raining though; did I mention that?

I’ve been reading…not that I am ever without a book, but I’ve been getting through them at a better rate (we’ll see what happens now it is term-time again). One of my reads was not on the label, an interesting book in the same vein as tescopoly or fast food nation. It wasn’t full of surprises but has reinforced a lot of the things I was trying to do anyway – so I am back baking bread, which had slipped over the holidays (and early pregnancy too, don’t forget – a pretty damn good excuse if you ask me) and stepping back from the meat-centric diet we had drifted towards. (This is complicated by Tamsin being almost exclusively carnivorous.) I have dug out my excellent river cottage bread book and today attempted english muffins (that’s them in the picture); bagels are next on the hit list. I am unsure about prawns, the farmed fish/wild fish thing continues to confuse me, but I feel quietly smug (and lucky) to have an organic farm shop in the next village that competes with the supermarkets price-wise and stocks about 95% of things I want.

We travelled from Chester to London, arriving around lunchtime – dumped our bags at the hotel and made our way to the Natural History museum. Brilliant, but unfortunately the entire under-13 population of London had chosen the same day to visit so although we spent time in the fascinating geology section and saw the whales, some of the mammals and some ichthyosaurs, there was a huge queue for the dinosaurs. Of course, with hindsight and post-disney, a 45-minute wait is nothing and we should have just queued and looked on it as good practice and getting our eye in.

The next morning saw us trundling cases to board the Disney Express!(I seem to have neglected to photograph children with backpacks, which is a shame because I may be biased but they were damn cute). Momentary excitement at the Eurostar terminal as Cameron spotted half of the Magic Numbers (I didn’t come over all groupie and ask for autographs, though I was tempted), then later, on his own, the other half, the Cooks (?) and Damon Albarn (he also refrained from gazing star-struckly, but only just). Then major excitement as we spotted a million small children and heard a jazz band pom-pom-pomming the Bare Necessities. The disney express, naturally, was a riot and nobody cared about noise; although it was very kind of the little girl the seat behind to give my children a lolly each, I could have done without her grabbing Tamsin repeatedly by the hair.

We arrived, greeted by Chip and Dale (T very nervous of dressed-up characters, as predicted), dropped our luggage, had a ludicrously overpriced panini, and headed into the park, where we also spent the next full day.

Hits: lunch with the princesses, the flying elephant ride, the small world, Aladdin’s cave, and most of all the old-fashioned carousel* and the parade, which we had to see twice. The fountains.

Misses: the Peter Pan carpet ride, the Alice maze, ice lollies (?), walking

(*Sigh. We could have stayed here and gone to the fairground.)

It was gloriously, almost too, hot and sunny. Unexpectedly, queuing didn’t faze the children one little bit: while C and I balked at the idea of standing for 45 minutes in order to go round and round and up and down 5 times, they couldn’t have cared less. Tamsin disliked most of the characters, though was really keen for them to sign her autugraph book – Wiggley** Pooh being her absolute favourite, although she did not want to approach within a few feet. All she really wanted, for the entire 4 days, was for Minnie Mouse to sign her book…fortunately we spotted her on the last morning! I was braved ready to pick T up reassuringly and help her but for some toddler-logic reason, Minnie is not scary and she rushed forward very confidently.

We spent part of Friday in the Walt Disney Studio Park, for some variety and because there was a High School Musical show, which clearly was not to be missed. Here, we traumatised the children by taking them on a ride where they demonstrated special effects – so we were nearly drowned, caught in an explosion, then singed by dragons. The “animagique” show was mixed – pink elephants bad, fish good – and the cinemagique one was also very scary (you shouldn’t have taken us to that should you mummy). All soothed by a cuddle from Daisy Duck and a trip on some flying carpets.

I suspended all cynicism – to be honest I don’t have that much anyway – apart from this photograph, which I had to take and share joyfully with Mia and Karen in particular – and found that I loved it’s a small world. Even C found things to enjoy…at the end of the day, if the children are happy, we are happy.  All that said, by Saturday I was ready to go somewhere where we could relax a bit – there were so many people at Disney that I was hawklike over the children the whole time, both so as to not lose them and so they wouldn’t annoy anybody (I have no idea why I am so sensitive to this. Uniquely so, it seems.) – I felt I was having to reign them in more than I wanted.

(**Winnie the)

Selected rest of photographs here.

c.f. full term with Tamsin – not so much smaller, is it! (Is obviously not a mega-baby this time, is rather more to do with pies and the consumption thereof, and exercise, a dearth of.)

This picture is the reason I wanted to fix my blog. Though it has taken me so very long to do, and I have been hiating for so very long, that I don’t suppose anybody will see it who isn’t friend or family. Hey ho: I will pretend to myself and post it anyway by way of an announcement.

Maggie came home from school with this card that she had made for me, the day after we told her there was going to be another baby. If you can look carefully you can see, peeping out of my tummy (for that is me, the funky smily lady in the cool purple frock), and tiny, smiling, waving baby. Inside, the card reads “to my littl baibee I love you” and it is quite one of the sweetest things I have ever seen.

Apparently it was -11 degrees in Chester last night, and it certainly felt icy this morning, so I feel no guilt about staying in. I can hardly insist Tamsin digs in the sandpit. I have lentils boiling, flapjack baking, T asleep on the sofa. Also nothing for tea and dust you could write your name in, but I never claimed to be perfect.

*4 rows and counting.

The recipe for these lovely Jewel Biscuits is taken almost un-fiddled-with from the lovely Scheherezade Goldsmith’s lovely Christmas book (subtitle: how to have a really lovely jolly eco Christmas; chapter 1: first acquire an enormous amount of money and several hundred acres of Herefordshire. Add staff to do the menial stuff while you footer about with felt and oranges, and find friends of the sort to appreciate a galvanised bucket of salt as a present.)

Ahem.

Cream 100g butter and 275g caster sugar. Add 1/2 tsp vanilla extract and 2 large eggs, then sift in 525g plain flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 2 tsp ground cinnamon and a pinch of salt. Mix it all up with a slosh of milk until it is nice and doughy, then wrap in clingfilm and rest in the fridge for 30 minutes or so (NB Sheherezade does not specify clingfilm as it is not very eco. Use whatever you like.)

Preheat the oven to 190C. Roll out the dough on a nice floury surface, to about 1/2 cm thick. Cut shapes – I did a Christmas tree, a star and a bell – and use a smaller cutter (or the lid of a  screw-cap wine bottle) to make holes. Fill the holes with crushed hardboiled sweets* (S says they should be organic; I used Foxes). You could sprinkle some caster sugar over now, for a glittery effect, but I found I preferred a snowy dusting of icing sugar once they were cooled. Don’t forget to make a hole if you want to hang them – and you really do, else you can’t appreciate the stained-glass centres. Put in the oven on baking sheets covered in baking parchment, about 10 minutes: move the entire bit of parchment onto the cooling rack and leave until completely cold. Icing sugar; ribbon (cellophane bag for school fete).

Oh, and the book says this makes 12 cookies…mine were reasonably large (palm-sized trees and stars; slightly smaller bells), certainly as big as you would want, and I got about 30, plus another 15 toddler-sized plain stars when I ran out of sweets.

*My entire kitchen is covered in minute shards of hardboiled sweet. Ignore at your peril Sheherezade’s top tip of putting them in a (clean, recycled) plastic bag before bashing with a rolling pin: the individual plastic wrappers Do Not Do. Or, as I found rather late in the process, if you get your hole the right sort of size – say the size of the wine-bottle top – you don’t have to crush at all, just bung an intact sweety in. They melt just the same.