ha, ha, very amusing

I had a look at the book we bought when littlepixie was born, you know the type, it goes through their development by age and says “your baby can now see 1 metre in front of them” that type of thing. Haven’t looked at in ages, mostly because it was hidden in the mysterious realms of “under the couch”.

Anyway, in the section on 18-24 months it says

“Your child may start to wake during the night”

ha, ha, ha, haaaaaaaaaaaaa, start? Was she meant to stop doing it at some stage? Ah well, at least I won’t have to experience any culture shock adjusting to her new night-wakenings!

On a related note, does anyone else have a child whose preferred sleeping position is sprawled across you?

I start off lying on my side facing her but she rolls me onto my back when I’m asleep, leans over me, latches onto the opposite boob, and goes back to sleep, happy as a clam. Crazy child!

Chai “Cheese”cake & Happy Birthday Mr. HPP

Mr. HPP is having a wonderful birthday, we went to the beach, for a walk in the woods, to the playground, got takeout soy cappuchinos with hummus & tomato pesto bruschettas, and generally chilled. Littlepixie is having a snooze, Mr. HPP is reading his birthday books and I’m letting you all know that Chai “Cheese”cake rocks! Oh it’s very, very delicious indeed. Have a look…

The recipe suggests keeping the cheesecake in the fridge for 24 hours to let the flavours develop so I made it yesterday.

Quite a simple recipe so only one real substitution was made. I have no idea what Graham crackers are so I made the base out of bourbon creams, anyone who has had these will appreciate what a yummy base it must be. I thought it would be hard to find vegan chocolate biscuits to crush but as with many “cream” biscuits, the bourbon creams are vegan, excellent! I separated the biscuits from their cream fillings and crushed them. The cream fillings mysteriously disappeared over the course of the day!

This morning I lightly dusted the top of the “cheese”cake with some Cocodirect Drinking Chocolate mix and a scattering of dairy-free chocolate buttons. Very, very delicious.

This was our first foray into the wonderful world of My Sweet Vegan by Hannah Kaminsky from Bittersweet Blog and I must say our tastebuds are very, very happy indeed!

Roll on Green Tea-mirisu next week

Do you see google ads here?

Yesterday I happened to look at my blog from a different computer and I noticed some Google ads on it, under the post title and before the comments. I didn’t put them there. I went sleuthing and it seems WordPress have been adding them sporadically to WP blogs over the last few years.

Fair enough, it’s a free service and a good, reliable service so I can’t complain. But I don’t like the way the ads look, they are in the same font and colours as my posts, and look like I put them there. I put a bit of effort into making my blog clean and pleasant to read, and the ads look yuck.

Anyway, apparently regular readers shouldn’t see them more than once, and I never see them as I’m logged in all the time.

WordPress have mentioned that they will be offering an upgrade at some stage where you can get an ad-free blog. This sounds very good, so I’m keeping my ears open for that. In the meantime, if you ever see any ads here that are inappropriate or unsuited to this blog could you please leave a comment and let me know.

Thanks, happy weekend

Baking plans…

It’s Mr. HPP’s birthday “fortnight” so I used it as an excuse to procure a new vegan dessert book, My Sweet Vegan by Hannah Kaminsky of Bittersweet Blog fame. Each dessert has a full colour, full page photo and if I could eat them right off the page I would. But I can’t so I have to bake them instead…

So, Mr HPP has chosen the following delectable treats…

Chai Cheesecake
Green Tea-mirisu
Green Tea popsicles

Unfortunately, I have no matcha powder yet (it’s in the post) so this weekend will just be the Chai Cheesecake, made on Sunday for his actual birthday yum

Next weekend will be the green tea madness weekend, you remember what he had last year? Well this year is going to be extra extra green tea flavoured! I am on a mission to hunt down all the Green Tea recipes in my cookbooks to create a Green Tea extravaganza, I know I saw a recipe for GT ice-cream somewhere.

And then, at some stage, providing I can find Dutch-processed cocoa powder, I have promised to make him the bizarre-sounding wasabi chocolate cupcakes, also from My Sweet Vegan. Aren’t I a lovely wife? I will keep you all posted with delightful photo and yumminess reports over the next two weekends!

Happy Birthday Fortnight, Mr. HPP

Fun moments

Sitting on the couch with littlepixie, digging our spoons into a creamy avocado like it’s a tub of ice-cream and singing “the wheels on the bus go round and round”.
It’s just the best

Play is the child’s work

My 18 month old daughter loves to dance. At mother and toddler group every week she watches and tries to mimic the hand movements that the older children & mums do as they sing all of the nursery rhymes. She claps loudly at the end of each song and jumps up and down excitedly waiting for the next to begin. When we get home we sing silly songs and do even sillier dances as we try to remember all the different moves.

We also occasionally go to a toddler’s singing & dancing group which has its own special songs. Yesterday, during bathtime, I started singing one of these songs to her, it was about stamping on bubbles and clapping bubbles to make them pop. She stood up in the bath and started to stamp her feet along with my wonderful singing and then she clapped her hands along with the next verse.

What amazed me was the fact that we haven’t been at that group in about 2 months, she hasn’t heard that song in 2 months and yet the minute I started to sing it she jumped up to join in with the dance that she remembered.

Our children are like sponges, it is truly amazing how much they notice the world around them and how they store the seemingly irrelevant little details of life for future use. I once heard a wonderful description which was “play is the child’s work” and it’s true, every minute of every day as you sing songs, dance dances, bounce balls and push carts with your child, you are nourishing them and helping them with their important work, their play.

It is these little games, where the only props they might have are a dishcloth, a cardboard box and a wild imagination, that will give your child the tools they need for life. It may look like they are “wasting” time by playing pirates or shop, however they are actually hard at work developing crucial life skills, including concentration, problem solving and self-regulation. A report on NPR entitled “Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills” explains more about these skills and their importance in the child’s future adult life. This report also highlights a worrying trend in many schools today (even preschools), the reduction of playtime in favour of more study time.

It seems that in the rush to give children every advantage — to protect them, to stimulate them, to enrich them — our culture has unwittingly compromised one of the activities that helped children most. All that wasted time was not such a waste after all.

We should all make time to join in with our children as they go about their daily work and sing a silly song, dance a silly dance and, most of all, have lots and lots of fun together!

You’ve just read my most recent post for API Speaks, which was published over there yesterday.

API Speaks is still only less than a month old, but already there are some fantastic articles over there, pop on over and say “hi”, you’ll probably recognize a good few of the contributors!

grrr… Monsters

Yay, wordpress rocks. They have just enabled monsterID. Before this, anyone without a wordpress avatar or a gravatar looked like this… but now you are all monsters! The monsters are generated from your email address, clever eh?

Here are some of you, but I’m not telling who they are….

Leave a comment below and as if by magic your monster self will appear…..

Wordless Wednesday - Welly Boots

Woo hoo! Littlepixie’s first pair of welly boots, let the fun commence

You can see more Wordless Wednesdays at WW HQ and 5 Minutes for Mom, enjoy!

Too hot to blog

Beautiful May bank holiday weather, inflatable pirate ship full of plastic balls in the kitchen, bucket and spade at the beach, sand pit and paddling pool at granny & grandad’s house, sliding down slides, swinging on swings, a new pair of sandals, helping mammy hang the washing out, lots of visitors, first pair of welly boots.

No wonder mammy has no time to blog

Performance anxiety

Am I the only person who gets performance anxiety when faced with those stupid captcha things? Like these…

There are supposed to be 6 letters in each of those, now if I stick my face into the computer screen I can just about make out the presence of the light grey letters, so on the first one is that a 2? Is the last letter on the second one an 8 with a bit missing? And is that a G or a sideways Q on the last one? And for the maximum number of points what, oh what is the first letter on the last one?

It’s not as if they are guarding the most top secret of sites, oh no, these craptchas are what stands between us mere-sighted mortals and using the search function on veggie boards, that’s all it is, a vegetarian forum search, not Fort Knox or the Secret Service, so why is it so bloody hard to use!!!!

At least they have a “reload new image” link so you can try a new craptcha, but honestly who cares enough to keep clicking it?