This Little Piggy Made Roast Beef, But This Little Chickie Had None

This morning was a scene of domestic bliss with Mummy Bear and Baby Bear eating their porridge together in oaty harmony. Mummy Bear enjoying an additional splash of maple syrup and Baby Bear freshly pureed fruit. What the nursery rhyme didn’t mention was that Daddy Bear had to go to work to finance Baby Bear’s extravagant lifestyle and underhand measures were still being employed by Mummy Bear to get Baby Bear to eat fresh fruit and vegetables.

As laborious as Chickie’s new liquidising regime is, it has left me feeling exceptionally virtuous as I lay my freshly prepared offerings before him thrice daily. Couple this with my new 7.30am rise time and the fact I had bathed me and baby, boiled and blended (not me and baby), dishwashered and put a load of washing on, all by 9am, and I was struggling to imagine a more efficient housewife could exist.

At 10am Chickie and Mummy arrived at Playgroup in matching cropped trousers with accompanying goosebumps. Chickie made a confident entrance which he managed to sustain throughout the morning. The handful of biscuits he grabbed on arrival had much to do with it.

Unfortunately for Chickie, something nasty laid in wait and he was extracted from his happy Lego peppered world to be transported to a room so familiar he can point to all his favourites features (fan, clock and lights) at speed. At 11.45am, Chickie was sat, cropped trousers round ankles, as the two previously nice nurses at the Doctors suddenly turned nasty and jabbed him simultaneously in each leg. Chickie was not impressed and wailed loudly to indicate his dissatisfaction. Super Mummy swooped the stand-by dummy into the screaming hole with lightning speed. Wailing continued to leak through the dummy into the waiting room, at which point, the back up Cheerios came into play. Punctured thighs forgotten, he crawled off to point at the ceiling fan.

After a three hour nap, more wailing and more Calpol, distraction techniques were deemed necessary and he was strapped into his stroller. To encourage Chickie onto his feet, as his relaxed approach to walking is now becoming embarrassing, I held his hand as he tottered down to the shore. As I crouched down beside him on the sand, he could not have looked sweeter, his little face full of wondrous delight as the sea lapped at his feet.

I replayed that memory in mind an hour later to remind me that magical moments do happen and that must be the reason people temporarily forget times like now and do it all over again. Surrounded by the pots, pans, blenders, utensils and mess that had all been involved in the preparation of his beef dinner, I was beyond upset that Chickie was so unappreciative of my efforts that he refused to even open his mouth. Tired and despondent, I scraped it into a Tupperware pot and gave him yoghurt for tea.