Chocolate for Breakfast

When I was about a week away from giving birth to my fourth child I asked my midwife how I'd know when I was in labour. She thought I was joking! I was living in Abu Dhabi at the time and the local law states that babies must be all be born in a hospital. With each of my previous labours my waters had broken before contractions started and that was my trigger to go to hospital, but I was worried in case this time was different. As it turned out, my concerns were justified; having had light contractions for almost a day and waited until the children were in bed before going for a check up, my youngest daughter was born 15 minutes after I arrived at the hospital.

Being a mum is a constant learning process; every child is unique and every day brings its own challenges and joys.
Despite the thousands of parenting gurus offering great advice, there aren't any hard and fast rules. With my first baby I wanted everything to be perfect so tried to do it all by the book (well, not exactly because I didn't read the baby books, but I had a rough idea of how good parenting should look). Only home-made purees and organic formula were good enough to wean our first-born; he was protected from the evils of sugar at nursery by my insistence that he had a plate of fresh fruit after meals whilst his friends tucked into ice cream, cakes, and cooked puddings; a treat was cherry tomatoes and fruit yogurt, and once a week he got half a chocolate button. When he was about three he found half a packet of chocolate buttons and four fruit pastilles in my bag and had a private party under the dining table. He was on a sugar high for hours and the crash was awful to watch - I couldn't stop him crying. He's just turned 19 and now with the skill of a trained police-dog he'll sniff out and devour any sugary treats in the house, no matter how well I hide them. It's not unheard of, on the other hand, for child number four to have chocolate cake for breakfast! It's not that I don't care, it's just that I realise that perfection is unrealistic and going with my instincts often works out better.

I also know that she'll have burned off the sugar rush in the last-minute mad dash from the car to the classroom because we're late for school again!