• teaches a baby about communication
• introduces concepts such as stories, numbers, letters, colours, and shapes in a fun way
• builds listening, memory, and vocabulary skills
• gives babies information about the world around them

Other than the above, reading to Amelia is just so much fun. I adore books and I hope to instil the same love of reading in her. I read Amelia all sorts, from soft cover baby friendly picture books to Nursery Rhymes to the likes of Anthony Browne’s Gorilla. At the moment, Amelia (4 months) seems most receptive to Giraffes Can’t Dance, written by Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees. The story has a lovely message, the writing is lyrical and the pictures are gorgeously bright and bold. I also have two smaller hard cover books, which Amelia loves to bat with her ever roving hand as I read to her, also by Giles Andreae (and David Wojtowycz) called Commotion in the Ocean and Rumble in the Jungle. Both books feature really funny poems about oceanic and jungle animals respectively and I can already see Amelia favouring certain illustrations over others: the toothy shark and pink Octopus never fail to mesmerise. I love books with a great sense of humour and Giles Andreae seems to have just that. I think that reading stories to your baby that you find entertaining is a great place to start.

According to the Toronto Star, customers at Angerer’s restaurant Klee have been asking to try the cheese and he has prepared some amus-bouche – canapé of breast-milk cheese with figs and Hungarian pepper although he has no plans to sell it. The New York Post writes that city authorities have told the restaurant not to serve its cheese to customers, whether sold or given away.

The taste of the breast milk cheese is affected by what Angerer’s wife has had to eat: of the two batches he has made thus far, the first tasted salty-sweet and the second was slightly spicy.

The full recipe is on Angerer’s blog. Here are the ingredients:

My Spouse’s Mommy Milk Cheese Making Experiment
(basic recipe using 8 cups of any milk – yields about ½ pound cheese)

4 cups mother’s milk
1½-teaspoon yogurt (must be active cultured yogurt)
1/8-tablet rennet (buy from supermarket, usually located in pudding section)
1 teaspoon sea salt

Source: Guardian.co.uk

According to the NHS, the side effects for the two month vaccine are (potentially)

• a slightly raised temperature
• irritability
• some sickness and/or diarrhoea
• a small lump at the site the injection, which may last for a few weeks
• your baby may be miserable within 48 hours of having the injection.
• Some swelling and redness at the site of the injection may occur in as many as one in ten children who receive the vaccine.

Very rarely (in less than 1 in 1,000 children), a day or two after they have received this vaccine babies have been reported as:

• experiencing febrile convulsions
• having very high temperatures
• being floppy and less responsive than usual
• crying an unusual, high-pitched cry

For further information on the immunisations given to infants click on the link: NHS Factsheet

Related Breast pumps are weird

‘The dummy war’ pits the ideology of non-users against that of users. See below some of the advantages and disadvantages of dummy use.

Advantages:

• Dummies can soothe a baby and thus help the baby settle to sleep.
• Sucking on a dummy can relieve pain (Pinelli et al 2002; Carbajal et al 2000), which is why parents often give their baby a dummy when they have colic.
• Using a dummy has been linked with helping to prevent cot death (Department of Health 2009).
• Sucking on a dummy can help some premature babies. If they are given a dummy to suck on before feeds, they may transfer more quickly from tube to bottle-feeding, and feed more effectively from a bottle (Pinelli and Symington 2005). Using a dummy can also result in shorter hospital stays for premature infants (Pinelli and Symington 2005).

Disadvantages:

• There is a proven link between prolonged dummy use and middle ear infections (PIER 2001). It’s thought that sucking on a dummy increases the chance of an infection back-tracking from the mouth into the Eustachian tube (the air-filled passage connecting the middle ear with the back of the throat) (Hanafin and Griffiths 2002).
• dummy use has been associated with a higher risk of symptoms such as vomiting, fever, diarrhoea, and colic (North et al 1999).
• Long-term dummy use can lead to dental problems – the British Dental Health Foundation (2005) discourages the use of dummies or thumb-sucking as both can result in problems as the teeth grow and develop, particularly if your child is still using this as a comfort when their permanent teeth are coming through (BDHF 2005)
• Using a dummy prevents babies from babbling, which is an important step in learning to talk, and discourages toddlers from chatting, which they need to do to develop their language skills (The National Literacy Trust, accessed 2008).
• Using a dummy on a daily basis interferes with breastfeeding – there is strong evidence that women who use pacifiers are more likely to wean their babies off the breast earlier than breastfeeding mothers who don’t use pacifiers on a daily basis (Benis 2002; Vogel et al 2001). Dummy use is linked to breastfeeding exclusively for a shorter amount of time and a lack of milk when the baby is one month old (Vogel et al 2001).

Source: Babycentre

Many of the points posed above will be debated by users and non-users. Although it is a good idea to do some research I don’t think that it is good to get caught up in opinions, theories and even facts. Do what’s best for you and your baby, without shame or guilt and without being bullied by research and advice givers.

Other Children’s books illustrated (and some written) by Christina Balit:

• An Arabian Home: Leila and Mustapha’s Story, Christina Balit
• Atlantis: The Legend of a Lost City, Christina Balit
• Escape from Pompeii, Christina Balit
• Blodin the Beast, Michael Morpurgo
• Ishtar and Tammuz: A Babylonian Myth of the Seasons, Christopher J. Moore
• The Twelve Labours of Hercules, James Riordan
• Zoo in the Sky, Frances Lincoln, National Geographic, Jacqueline Mitton
• Women of Camelot: Queens and Enchantresses at the Court of King Arthur, Mary Hoffman
• My Sister Shahrazad: Tales from the Arabian Nights, Robert Leeson
• Everlasting Stories: A Family Bible Treasury, Chronicle Books, Lois Rock
• Once upon a Starry Night: A Book of Constellation Stories, Jacqueline Mitton
• The Lion Book of Tales and Legends published as Saintly Tales and Legends, Lois Rock
• Easter: The Everlasting Story, Lois Rock
• Zodiac: Celestial Circle Of The Sun, J Mitton
• The Scarab’s Secret , Nick Would
• The Adventures of Odysseus, Hugh Lupton and Daniel Morden
• King and Queens of The Bible, Mary Hoffman
• The Lion book of Wisdom Stories from around the World, David Self

Certainly not in the first six weeks of a baby’s life when baby is still trying to figure out his place in the world: when crying replaces the soft humming of the computer, the sound of mommy’s favourite TV program or the still, quiet night; when baby thinks that lumpy, hard chests are way more comfortable than a soft cot (or anywhere else for that matter); when mommy’s bed is just so much better than baby’s own; when, like all three of my children, baby has reflux – every time he lies down he ends up sleeping in his own throw-up and mommy has to change his clothes and bedding 50 times a day; when mommy spends hours washing the floor, couch, carpet and bed, or wherever else baby’s projectile vomit has landed in mommy’s once beautiful, unsoiled home. And don’t forget the constant nappy changes – I didn’t know that a human being could pooh that much! Newborn babies must pooh at least eight times a day. Man! You would never get off the toilet if that carried on into adulthood.

Maybe rest will come when baby is a bit older and learns the difference between day and night, and stops waking up every three hours to eat. Maybe. But ‘parent irony’ soon kicks in: when my twin boys finally learnt how to sleep through the night my three year old daughter forgot. So no rest for mommy. Then, when all three children finally sleep through the night again, mommy still can’t sleep: she finds herself waking up at every little grunt and groan and then lying awake waiting to see if baby is going to want a midnight bottle … 2am bottle … 3am bottle. So baby sleeps and mommy doesn’t. To confound matters, hubby can’t sleep – this too becomes mommy’s problem.

Maybe it gets better the older mommy’s children get. Maybe not. Inevitably, one or more of mommy’s children will contract some sickness from somewhere and mommy is up all night again. My oldest is almost four and I can imagine a hundred different scenarios that go way into her young adult years and beyond, that would keep me up at night.

So when does a mommy sleep? Who knows?

Costumes range from $29.95 – $39.95 (£18 – £24).