Earning a day at Disney

Believe it or not, P has never been to Disneyland. She must be the only five year old in Southern California who hasn't. As it happens, I haven't either. People look surprised when I tell them that - it's like saying you've never been to London, as a Brit (same cultural significance) - but given that I moved here in my thirties, it really isn't so strange. Before that my closest Disney option was Eurodisney, and there are about a million better things to do on a trip to France than go to Eurodisney.

And so it is that we are a pair of Disney virgins. I could go to my grave without ever visiting, but P would be a deprived child if we let this situation go on much longer. Up until recently she's been content playing on broken slot machines at Redondo Pier, but we think it's time she saw what a real amusement park was all about.

She's of an age now where kids chat - at least, I assume that's how come she knows about Shimmer & Shine, because it certainly didn't come from our house - and I'd hate her to miss out on something all her buddies get to enjoy. Wait till her schoolmates find out we only have one TV. They'll think she's a complete freak. It's not only caving to peer pressure. I also know she will absolutely love the experience.

So we told P that once she was five she'd be old enough to go to Disneyland. And hope none of her friends told her they've had a SoCal Family pass since they were toddlers. She turned five in February. So what's taken so long?

Well, once we decided we should take her, we decided we should make the most of it. Hence, the sticker chart. The road to Disney, for P at least, was paved with good deeds. For every good deed, she earned a sticker, and once she has a sticker in every spot, we will take her to Disney. As you can see by the state of it, P has got properly invested in the chart, adding her own titles and pictures. She spends a lot of time counting the stickers and the empty spots.

 In case you're curious - ooh, you'd get a sticker for that - she gets stickers for being helpful, kind, brave, curious and adventurous. Aka tidying up after herself, eating vegetables, and generally being compliant. It's really not that hard.

We've enjoyed two months of extra helpfulness, and an incentive for her to do things that are challenging. She's only a few stickers away from the big reward now. I'm pretty sure she'll love it easily enough for us to add some extra empty spots into the next sticker chart. 

Transatlantic Mother's Day

Four years after I first suggested it, TLOML is finally taking the bait. He's celebrating Mothering Sunday - aka the British Mother's Day, which moves according to the Church calendar. I have just been given some flowers and am about to be taken out for brunch.

This is great for a couple of reasons. It's very nice to be taken out for brunch and made a fuss of - and much nicer when the restaurant isn't full of other mums who are also being taken out for brunch and made a fuss of. It also creates some space between Mother's Day (the American version, in May, according to the Hallmark calendar) and my birthday. This means we can avoid a repeat of last year's incident when TLOML referred to a gift as 'for your birthday... or Mother's Day... whichever'.

And of course, because America will be marking the American Mother's Day, with a bit of luck I'll get cards and flowers again in May. But not brunch in an overcrowded restaurant. Winning!

Or is it? True Mother's Day also involves a lie in and not doing any housework. Those components are missing from this Mothering Sunday. But if I try to score a lie in and a day of rest on American Mother's Day will I be told we already celebrated back in March?  And will TLOML demand two Father's Days? I may have made a tactical error here. Still, probably worth it to avoid the oversubscribed brunch.

Adulting

A lot changes when you become parents. We knew this. But if you'd have told me five years ago, that I'd consider a school fundraiser to be a good night out, I would have hoped you were dead wrong.

In fact TLOML and I pride ourselves on the fact that we have proved wrong those friends who said 'you'll never enjoy a leisurely coffee with the Sunday paper again'. We do just that, every Sunday, thanks to Disney. Our lives don't completely revolve around P. Oh, who am I kidding, of course they do. Still, we make time for ourselves and each other, we manage to enjoy a steady stream of happy hours, dinners with friends, and date nights with cocktails, or opera, or dinner, or all three.

Rarely is there dancing, however. (Well, there was that one time the New Yorker was in town. But we were in jeans and flats, in the spit-and-sawdust Hermosa Saloon, and someone on the dance floor was wearing a beanie hat. It wasn't exactly high glamour). And equally rarely am I wearing heels. And never, not since P came along, has there been dancing whilst wearing high heels. It's partly just because that's not how Hermosa rolls. Locals consider you dressed up for dinner here if you wear jeweled flip flops with your beach dress.

This time last year, when we saw a lot of people our age wearing heels and cocktail dresses/ suits, tottering into a marquee in downtown Hermosa Beach, we were intrigued. Who were these people? They looked like our demographic. Only more glamourous. It turns out the one event in Hermosa Beach that people do get dolled up for is the Hermosa Beach Education Foundation annual fundraiser. We diarized that event right away - even though P won't actually be in the Hermosa school system for another year or two - and I'm so glad we did.

I wore sequins and gold heels. TLOML wore his nicest suit with his spiffiest shirt. All the brightest stars in the firmament that is Hermosa parents of K-8 children were there. We mingled with neighbours and people we see around town, and bid at the silent auction, and enjoyed quality booze and food from some local eateries, and danced. Oh we danced our socks off! To covers of Warren G, and Journey, and every other 80s and 90s act in between.

 A rare sighting: Hermosa mums in heels

We felt we were adulting pretty hard, to be honest. An education foundation benefit? We're really doing this! When we tottered out of there, TLOML carrying the two chairs we won at the auction aloft, we decided not to go on for a drink because the chairs would be a bit cumbersome. Also an adult choice. On Monday I met the education foundation president to see if I could get involved. Which is also pretty adult of me. What have we become? A couple of settled-down, community-minded parents, that's what.

Whooo hoooo! Where next?!

I'm happy to say that despite all the changes in our lives, TLOML and I still know how to tear up a dance floor. Even better, thanks to the Hermosa Beach Education Foundation, we might still get to do that thing. At least once a year.

The strange world of fake food, and the strange requests of an almost four year old

The dreams of a child - our child, at least - are beautifully modest. All P wants for her birthday is a toy cheesecake. For Christmas all she wanted was some tights, a new water bottle, and some tiny toy dishes. She got all of those things, and some other stuff too, but her favourite gift was the tiny toy dishes. That particular request was, I think, inspired by the Elf on the Shelf book:

'I'll listen to you. Tell me your wishes.

Would you like a game or some tiny toy dishes?'

Maybe the cheesecake is inspired by a lazy rhyme in some other kids' book. Maybe it's because she has been obsessed with cheesecake since she ate some at Thanksgiving - and had some more for breakfast the next day. In fact she has been quite insistent that her birthday cake be an actual cheesecake, so I guess her whole birthday theme is cheesecake. Given the current Disney princess obsession I think we should consider ourselves lucky. It could  be much worse.

The tiny toy dishes were scored for a few dollars from Amazon. A birthday cheesecake is easily made. But a toy cheesecake is surprisingly difficult to procure. P has been very clear that it must not have any berries or glaze on top. Which rules out this $34 option, thank goodness. Not that I'm being cheap - we'd be more than happy to spend $34 on some fantastic toy or game. It just seems excessive for a small plastic food item.

This one can be custom made, so I could ask them to take the berries off, but I balked at the price here too.

I'm glad I found it though. I spent a happy, bewildered twenty minutes surfing the incredible range of goods on Fake Food Japan. The specificity ('ginger flavoured grilled pork') and the options (do you want your fake kiwi sliced, diced, peeled or in a yoghurt?) sent me on an intoxicating surf session.

While clearly not aimed at 4 year olds, these aren't just for restaurateurs either.

In case you can't read it, this is a description for a $181 fake cake which says 'why not fool your friends with these good enough to eat replicas pound cakes the next time you are having a dinner party?' Why not, indeed.

After many hours of surfing, I found a woman who crafts clay Christmas ornaments in the shape of cheesecakes, cannolis, and macarons. That's quite a niche. For the princely sum of $10 she is making me a berry-free cheese cake. Goodness knows how she makes any money. Perhaps she does it for the love of the craft.

I'm very happy to be able to give P exactly what she wants for her birthday. And, for the millionth time I wonder, how did any one raise children before the internet?

Crafting fever

Meanwhile, as I was wandering the aisles at Vonn's, Lady P was caught up in her own time-suck.

I was eager to find some fun stuff for her to do the week that school was closed - and there is only so much time I (or our babysitter) wants to spend at the park or the beach. So I bought a few craft kits.

They're for the kind of activities a better mother makes up with old clothes pegs and some pipe cleaners she happens to have lying around. Clearly I'm the kind of mother who likes to throw money at her problems. About $50 in total, for 5 boxes of carefully curated creative content. I thought P might spend a couple of afternoons doing them and we'd have some left for our flights this summer.

But it turned out I created a monster. Lady P was like a child possessed. She crafted all day long at the expense of doing anything else whatsoever. Her first request on waking, or returning to the house, or when she was supposed to be doing anything other than crafting, was 'Can I do craft?'.

Crafting in PJs

Crafting when we were supposed to be heading to the beach

Crafting naked

I tried to say yes as often as I could but really and truly you cannot craft every waking hour. You need to eat, sleep, get dressed, maybe even leave the house. Or so I kept telling Lady P.

She would not be moved. She only wanted to craft to the point of grumpy, fractious, hungry exhaustion. It was a little frightening at times. Like the way I imagine you'd feel if you were trying to take a mother bear away from her cubs, or a lion away from his kill.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Fifty dollars and five days later we have a house full of tiny bits of tissue paper and lollipop sticks. Oh, and of course all Lady P's creations. And while it made her very happy, she tore through those boxes so quickly I'm not sure it was great value.  Next time I think we'll just switch the telly on.

Growing up (but not like the Springsteen song)

I remember when going to a gig was a little freewheeling. Like, if the ticket said doors were open at 7.30pm, you’d show up around 9pm, a little the worse for wear, and continue to get mildly wasted whilst ignoring the support act. We stuck around for the encore, the encore after the encore, and if we were lucky we might sneak backstage for some green room partying. Okay that’s only happened a couple of times in my life, but still, it has happened. Afterwards there might some unsuccessful attempts to secure a cab, or a run for the last tube – none of which transportation had been particularly well considered beforehand. Unless it was at the Kentish Town Forum, or Camden Jazz Café, in which case it’d be a chatty walk home past a kebab shop or dodgy after hours bar. Did we eat before the gig? Maybe. Maybe we shared a bag of chips on the way home. Maybe we didn’t eat dinner at all. We were young, and carefree, and like I said, a little freewheeling.

Well, I don’t know if it’s age, or parenthood, or just life in the South Bay but all of that has changed. We had tickets to see Bruce Springsteen. The ticket said doors opened at 7.30, so what time do you think we got there? That’s right, round about 6.30pm. We wanted to be sure we had time to eat before the show, you see.

For what it’s worth, we weren’t the only ones thinking that way. The venue was already half full when we arrived, and we had to circle fully 4 stories of the carpark before finding a spot. When we did we saw a group of aged (oh, wait, they actually might be our age) Boss fans tailgating. For British readers, tailgating is when you eat junk food from the boot of your car before or after an event. I know. Anyway, that was happening.

Tailgaters

We weren't invited to any tailgates. So we decided to hit up the food trucks instead. There was a choice of tacos, fried chicken, curry and gelato. Because nothing says rock’n’roll like some artisanal frozen dessert.

The Boss knows his fan base. These are people who show up early to tailgate and eat gelato. So he showed up on stage at 8pm and just got on with it. He played all of The River, and then proceeded to rock out like a much younger man for many hours. For many, many hours. Possibly an hour too many for people with a babysitter to pay and a toddler alarm going off at 6.45am. And we were among the young ones there. Some people looked like they might be of an age to have a cup of Horlicks and be in bed by 9pm, to be honest.

These are my people now

Something else has changed too. Instead of cigarette lighters, people now use the torch on their smartphones to create that ‘many tiny candles illuminating an acoustic ballad’ vibe. Who knew? Maybe that's also my age, and at the gigs that carefree 20 somethings go to they all still whip their lighters out.

The beauty of thousands of iPhones swaying in sync

The Boss put on an incredible performance. We had a great time. But we didn’t get to bed till 1am… and not because we went to the after-party or missed the last train home, but because – this being LA – the traffic (as fifteen thousand people left the LA Memorial Arena in their large cars) was murder. Times have changed for me indeed. And with the exception of the traffic, I’d say my gig experiences are the better for it.

A Tail of two Doggies

This is Doggy. He was among the many soft toys, from Jellycat, John Lewis and other purveyors of sweet plush creatures, that Lady P was given when she was born. Because of that thing they tell you about babies liking monochrome we placed him alongside Lady P in her crib when she was just a few weeks old.

Doggy soon became a firm favourite. Here he is firmly tucked under Lady P's arm when she was about six months old.

Here he is, when Lady P had just turned one.

Again, he's tucked under the arm. He usually is. And if she has a free hand, she usually strokes his tail, especially if she is listening to a story or otherwise being snuggly, and even in her sleep, and particularly if she's a bit anxious. Holding Doggy and stroking his tail is pure comfort.

Early on it became clear that Doggy was too important to take risks with. We introduced a strict 'Doggy doesn't leave the house' policy, with exceptions made for overnight trips or other times we needed Lady P to chill out and go to sleep. We also bought a decoy Doggy, told Lady P we had washed Doggy and presented the new guy.

After that we took care to rotate them so they aged at the same rate. Here they are today:

Decoy Doggy lives hidden in our wardrobe.

I say decoy Doggy but I no longer know which one is the decoy. We have done such a good job mixing them up that I really can't tell them apart.

Guess who can?

That's right, Lady P. Over eighteen months after we began this elaborate scam, she is starting to see through the cracks. She keeps telling me 'I don't like Doggy anymore'. Which is odd because she really does love Doggy. When probed, she told me it was because his tail didn't feel right.

Then I realized that her habit of stroking his tail has worn it to an incredibly smooth state, and the one I'd just brought out from the wardrobe was almost imperceptibly less smooth. I don't know why my rotating of the Doggies has failed here. Perhaps the last few weeks have been particularly hard on that tail. We have had a lot of bugs and minor head injuries, so maybe more than the usual amount of snuggling and tail rubbing have been required.

I responded with a white lie. 'I just washed him', I said. But on some level, Lady P knows something is up with Doggy. Which means something is up with the whole world order, in her eyes. And if she finds out the truth, that there are really two Doggies, I think she'd be scarred for life.

So I guess I just have to keep up this pretense. Just for the next decade or so.

Party Post Mortem

The preparation wasn’t so bad, after all. I had spent some time on a conference call packing party favour bags, which was actually quite fun. And I  rather enjoyed a quiet night in making fairy cakes and meatballs. TLOML picked up some booze and 50 red balloons, and we strung up a few paper chains. Boom, just like that, ready to party.

Cakes

Balloons

The party itself was pretty fun too. Kids played, adults drank and chatted, it was all suitably relaxed and fun and we felt vindicated in our decision to opt out of the big hired venue party. ‘This is easy,’ I thought, ‘Who needs to outsource?’

Then there was the moment I realized there was kinetic sand all over every surface in the house (what kind of idiot rookie mum allows her 3 year old to open a toy like that at her party in her own goddamn home – with 7 toddler partners in crime ready to help spread it out?!).

A low point. My mistake.

Just for a second or two I thought ‘So that’s why people outsource’. I briefly considered the beach, or a park, for next year’s party. But February is a tricky time of year for that, due to the 10% chance of rain. Yes. I know, that’s about the same as London in June, and you'd still throw a party under a cloudy sky, but here a grey day would be considered disastrous.

Anyway, the clean up operation didn’t take long at all, and afterwards TLOML and I congratulated ourselves on a successful party. We’ll do it again next year, we decided. The same thing – a handful of kids, a little home cooking, some balloons and a lot of toys. What could be better?

And then… Lady P passed judgement.  ‘Did you like your party? Wasn’t it fun?’ I asked. ‘No.’ she said. ‘There were too many people. I like playing on my own’.

Well, I guess that’s next year’s birthday party planned already then. She can play on her own while TLOML and I sip champagne in her honour. Even easier!

Resisting peer pressure

'You do you', the trainer at my gym says, as I manhandle an empty bar bell while all around me women are thrusting 75lbs above their heads. I do. I do me.

And Lady P, most of the time, does Lady P. I hope her resistance to peer pressure remains strong as her birthday approaches. Now she's at pre-school, it's quite the event.

For her sugar-free birthday celebration at school we have to make a board about her. The brief is a bit vague but TLOML told me the other day he saw one that had been framed. I also saw a sparkly one once. I have used felt-tip pens, stickers and photos on a white foamex board to create something I am proud of. And as I was making it, TLOML said 'One of the things I love about you is how you didn't change your plans when I told you about that framed wooden birthday board, you just stick to your guns because you don't care about impressing the other mums'. Which I think is known as damning with faint praise, but I'll take what I can get.

We are similarly resolute in our attempt not to impress anyone with Lady P's birthday party. Barring one, all the birthday parties her classmates have thrown so far have been big dos. Hosted at indoor play areas with inflatable slides, trampolines, and (my favourite) a brilliantly messy art materials, they involve 30 odd kids, pizza and cake, giveaway bags full of plastic toys that delight a toddler and last about five minutes. The whole shebang costs as much as a flight to London and I'm just not sure Lady P needs us to throw her such a party.

So we're shrugging off the tyranny of an almost-three year old's social life, and going with a very small party at home, at which we will open up her toy cupboard, serve some goldfish crackers and fairy cakes, and hope that Lady P thinks it's the best party ever. I have consulted her about it and all she seems to really care about is that the balloons are red. Which they are. So, we'll do us and hopefully everyone will have a jolly time.

The limits of Lady P's imagination

Lady P's imagination is running wild right now.

The downsides are the occasional bout of night terrors, and her concerns about someone called 'the woo', who apparently lives under the headboard of her bed.

The upside is that she is constantly entertaining herself.

She can play Doctor with a chopstick and some salad servers as her surgical equipment. Two boxes are her 'robot shoes'.

'I'm wearing my robot shoes' 

This workout equipment on the greenbelt near our house is alternately a seesaw, and her house - so you have to knock before entering.

Cushions are stepping stones. The cardboard tube from the roll of Christmas wrapping paper is a horse, and sometimes a broomstick.

Most inanimate objects can be talked to. The turtle candle holder on our outside table gets a blow by blow account of cars passing by. Her toy moose is instructed to watch her jumping. And her favourite, 'Doggie', apparently insists on being cuddled during the scary bits of The Gruffalo's Child.

Yet, despite reading the story, moving the stupid thing every night, and telling him if she's being good in a stage whisper, she has absolutely no interest in communicating with the Elf on the Shelf.

Me: 'Look, that cheeky elf is eating a banana chip!'
Lady P (apathetically): 'Uh huh'.

The popular seasonal bribery is just not working on our Lady P. And while exasperated, I am equally proud of her contrariness and independent thinking.

On hoaxes, bomb threats, jitters and career suicide

There were lots of jitters around Hermosa and Manhattan Beach schools last week. On Monday, Wednesday and again on Friday a bomb threat was dialled in, targeting the local high school. The one Lady P's preschool is right next door to. On Monday and Wednesday the school was 'just' on lock down. Urgh, just typing that makes my stomach flip. On Friday they closed the high school, Lady P's Montessori, and the elementary school on the same campus.

I bemoaned these events in a 'this country!' way to my sister, who reminded me that when we were growing up various buildings were sometimes closed because of IRA bomb threats. None of the threats ever materialized in our home town, and I don't think I was particularly scarred by the existence of those threats.

Still, I was away from home during those first two threats last week, on a work trip to Florida. Reading about bomb scares when you're far from home does not help soothe the jitters.

Now I'm in Florida again and my goodness those jitters have spread big time: all the schools within the LA Unified School District were closed down because of another bomb scare. Our local schools are not in LA USD (in fact we moved here because LA USD has such a poor reputation) and remained open. But still, when 700,000 students are sent home it's hard to feel entirely comfortable with Lady P being in the classroom. And it's not like she has finals to sit for. But being the parent away from home, and knowing as I do that TLOML has an overwhelmingly busy work schedule, I didn't really want to call him up and suggest we (he) kept her home.

Fortunately for my peace of mind, he got the jitters too, and picked Lady P up early from school so she could spend most of her day with our former nanny. I know, I know, the whole thing was probably a hoax and she was perfectly safe at Montessori. But still, it's nice to know she's nowhere near a school today.

I'm heading home tomorrow and planning a significant change of lanes on my career path. In a totally unsurprising, mother-of-a-young-child move, I've decided I want to travel much less (okay, not at all), and I don't really care if that means sacrificing my career goals. Being home would not stop the jitters, but it would make it much easier to act on them. And if Lady P is at all disturbed by the changes to her school schedule, the 'lock downs' and the half-empty classrooms, it will be nice to be around to soothe her jitters too.

Happily, of course, Lady P is completely oblivious. Long may it stay that way. In which case I can use the time I no longer spend travelling doing fun stuff like baking cookies.

In search of Easter, and eggs

TLOML and I took Lady P and her cousins to the Hermosa Beach Easter Egg hunt this weekend. It was organized by Hope Chapel, a big church up on the hill, and was heavily advertised - including the fact that they were distributing 16,000 eggs. I found this unlikely, but should not have doubted. There were indeed many, many eggs.

The 0-2 year olds' section, moments before the hunt began

But it wasn't so much a hunt as a grab - especially for the youngest children, who had the eggs all laid out in front of them.

The 3-5 year olds, racing to grab as many eggs as possible

Meanwhile Lady P skips obliviously past dozens of eggs

We didn't cheer Lady P on quite as vociferously as some of the more focused parents. She was satisfied pretty quickly with her haul of five eggs, at which point we extracted ourselves to watch the frenzy that was the big kids' section. An announcement was made that there were some golden eggs with special prizes out there, and the hunt intensified.

A corner of the 6-9 year olds' section, with the hunt in full, aggressive swing

Frankly the whole thing was a bit ungodly. For a start, it was held on Saturday, resulting in children eating Easter eggs during Lent. Admittedly, Lady P is far from devout and she didn't actually give anything up for Lent. Still, it seemed wrong to me. It's just not how I was raised.

And there were children there with dozens of eggs. Way more than anyone could want or need. And parents strategising to grab as many eggs as possible, and rifling through them to find the golden ones, discarding the rest. Weird and as TLOML put it, a bit grotesque.

And the colouring in pictures that were provided in the play area weren't even of Jesus. In fact even though the whole thing was organised by a church there wasn't a mention of Jesus - except in the leaflets they gave you when you left. Which I suppose is a subtle way to market but seems a bit sneaky, almost cowardly, to me.

Like Lady P, I'm not exactly devout. But if she's going to enjoy Easter eggs she should at least know what Easter is all about.

So the next day - actual Easter Day - we hosted a rather more sedate egg hunt in the Sugar Cube's backyard, and took Lady P to church to sing Easter hymns. The balance was reset and the conserverative middle class feathers I didn't know I had were smoothed.

I think next year we might just stick to a family-only, organic-biscuits-in-every-egg, pre-church Easter Sunday egg hunt. I just don't think I'm American enough, yet, to get on board with the Hermosa egg hunt frenzy.

Only in America...

...would this guy -

a wildlife biologist with almost 30 years experience teaching Stone Age skills and nature connection and is considered one of the top Stone Age skills experts in North America. Chris has lived most of the past 20+ years in the wilderness ... he lived in a tipi for 6 years, homesteaded along the most remote mail route in the lower 48 states, lead totally Stone Age expeditions into the wilderness of Idaho and Oregon, worked in the most dangerous job in the world, was one of the largest python breeders in Canada, was a waiter at a 4 Star restaurant, managed over $100 million worth of property in Park City, UT, and has had multiple near-death experiences. His teachers include Lakota, Shoshone, Arapaho, Crow, Blackfeet and Serri tribesmen, many wilderness skills experts and life itself 

 - be making  his living running a kids summer camp, during which children learn:

• Sensory awareness, expanded vision 
• Silent walking and stalking 
• Tracking and reading animal signs  
• Safe use of knives and knife sharpening 
• Edible and medicinal plants 
• Fire by friction methods 
• Making rope/string from plants for fishing line, nets, snares, etc. 
• Primitive hygiene (making soap, shampoo, toothbrush and comb) 
• Paiute deadfall trap, quail trap and springpole snare 
• Accessing intuition 
• Native and nature immersion games 
• Traditional and modern stories 
• Wilderness ethics 

And, probably only in the beach towns of SoCal, come to that. Like so many aspects of life here, my first response on reading his ad was 'how ridiculous' - followed moments later, by the realization that this is awesome. What pampered, urban kid wouldn't gain something from mucking about with sticks and camouflage and fire with a professional wildman? Oh, and 'accessing intuition' too, of course.

It's the season for summer camp ads, and I'm seeing ads like this every day. Children here from the age of 6 or 7 and up can join a camp to pursue almost any interest you can possibly conceive of. I've heard of restaurant camp, photography and film making camps, an animal hospital camp, lego, chess and robotics, and a bunch of sporty ones too.

Nothing so high falutin' for Lady P. We've signed her up for a couple of days a week at the Montessori for the month of July - dipping our toe in the water of South Bay education, so to speak. In a few short years she'll be off experimenting with with knives and fire, playing chef or movie maker.

It's a long way from the summers I enjoyed as a child, of long days playing with my sisters and the local kids in the street or the fields behind our house, with very little structure to most of it. Which makes me think that maybe, when the time comes, we'll just ship her off to Yorkshire for a more traditional summer with her cousins - and call it 'British Camp'.

The joys of suburbia

When TLOML and I were living in Malibu we came down to the South Bay for drinks with a friend, and parked in the Metlox Center in Manhattan Beach. 

I remember dismissing Metlox as really boring. It was all newly built, populated by bland chains (Le Pain Quotidien, Papyrus, etc) and I thought it was rather suburban. Provincial, even. I think we even said, with faint disdain, 'it's like we're not even in LA anymore'. Those were our salad days, of course, of cocktails at Moonshadows, date nights at Nobu, and brunches at Gjelina. 

Fast forward five years and I finally get it.  I understand the appeal of a branch of Le Pain, where I can get a decent mid-morning snack for me and Lady P.

Even better, a unchallenging, reliable restaurant where TLOML and I can eat a proper, relaxed grown up brunch while Lady P runs wild just within sight.

 The beauty of a carefully designed, car-free, kid-friendly plaza.

A place where we can relax and let Lady P have her freedom, because all grown-ups are either accompanied by a child, or a well behaved labrador, or both.

 Shoot me now, I guess, but the appeal of suburban living has started to become wonderfully clear. As we say, with delight, 'it's like we're not even in LA anymore!'.

Long distance love

A long distance relationship is hard to maintain. That's why I moved from London to LA to be with TLOML after barely six months of dating. Being far from those we love is just hard on the heart. That's why sometimes I feel glum when my sister sends pictures of my nephews playing at my parents' home, or I hear of another dear friend's 40^th from which I'll be absent.

The travel BigCorp requires of me at the moment is taking its toll too, although the distances involved are not so great. For most of November and December work is taking me away from home each week. My trips are usually just a couple of days long, so in the grand scheme of things it's no great hardship.

But with early starts and late return flights, I often don't see Lady P between putting her to bed on Monday night and seeing her again on Thursday morning. Which is an absolute eternity. I hate it. And I know she feels the same. I know because the first time we FaceTimed her delight on seeing me was quickly followed with a demand, 'Mummy! Up!' which is shorthand 'please pick me up, squeeze me, and make me feel both loved and also as tall as an adult'. 'I can't, I'm sorry, not till tomorrow', I said. She wailed.

Just like those (rare, I might add) disagreements TLOML and I had on Skype when we were first dating, all parties ended the call feeling sad and dissatisfied. Lady P and I still FaceTime when I'm away, because it seems better than not, but there's a 50/50 chance it'll end in tears.

It's not just Lady P who's affected. TLOML dolefully said to me as I embarked on my last trip, 'I'm going to have to start season 3 of The Wire without you I'm afraid. You're never going to catch up now'.

But Lady P is the one I worry more about. Of course I know she's in perfectly good hands. She has a brilliant time with her beloved daddy and our nanny is all round fantastic. When she forgets I'm not there, Lady P is quite content. Still, I am not. Nor will I be, till this stint of travel is over and I can revert to my blissful, working from home, seeing Lady P every morning when she wakes up, and at every mealtime, and at every bedtime, life.

Hard copies of Vogue

I've been saving my Vogues for years. Not every edition - although I did used to buy it every single month. Just the big 'International Collection' reports with the most fabulous fashion stories in, from March and September. Oh, and the odd December issue. And any with Kate Moss on the cover. So you see it's a carefully curated collection of Vogues.

TLOML teased me for it, when we moved back to the UK and he came to know that I had kept them in storage for years, and that I planned to dust them off and put them back on my bookcase.

I saved them because they are beautiful. And because one day I might have a daughter who'd love to flick through old fashion magazines. Even in my carefree, single, 'I'll probably never settle down and have kids' years, I kept my the International Collection Vogues for my future daughter.

I used to love looking through my mum's old knitting patterns, and poking fun at the silly clothes people used to wear. I also endured a full blown addiction to Elle and Vogue throughout my teenage years. So on the basis that I might one day have a daughter, or a son who loves fashion, I saved them.

TLOML has made a strong argument for the fact that online archives are now available with every fashion photo ever taken. But to my mind there's nothing like the sensory pleasure of holding a magazine, flicking through the pages, the scent of printer's ink on paper. So I ignore the internet and keep my antiquated paper versions safe and sound at home.

Now I don't buy Vogue so often. Sometimes I even forget fashion exists, for whole weeks at a time. That's beach living for you. But at the airport recently I found myself browsing this shelf looking for a little unchallenging flight fodder:

On the rare occasion I read a magazine these days, I like it to be really easy to read

I was jolted by the sight of September Vogue, thick as a phone book (remember them?) and glossy and beautiful. It weighs more than my laptop and didn't fit in my case. But Lady P might want to read it one day.

So, reader, I bought it.

The least efficient search engine in the world

The site 'Let Me Just Google That For You' might have been invented for mothers. Or at least, a special, weird subset of mothers who combine internet savvy with a startling lack of, well, internet awareness.

I'm signed up to a couple of local Mommy groups, which should be a useful forum for women to sell/ source old baby clobber, and share tips and recommendations on local resources. We joined it in the hopes of finding a nanny share. But it also appears to operate as a general search engine. n a typical example, here's a woman wondering what's going on in Palm Springs next weekend.

And this lady has used her Sprint smartphone to search for a baker who doesn't use food colouring. Only instead of searching in a browser and effectively asking the whole world, she's emailed a bunch of local mums.

Twitter can be almost as bad. How's about this for a random question to ask a random bunch of people? Hasn't she ever heard of John Lewis or Good Housekeeping?

Many women, on becoming a mother, give up their desk job - and the hours at a computer screen, and the work-funded smartphone that went along with the job. Many of us also find that time to mooch about on the interweb is in short supply.

So it's understandable if they get a little disconnected with the wonderful world of the world wide web. I could forgive them for using the Yellow Pages, or looking in the local newspaper for this sort of info. But if you're savvy enough to use Twitter, or the almost-impossible-to-pierce Yahoo! Groups, surely you'd have heard of Google, or Yelp?! And you can bet they're tech smart enough to upload a million pictures of their baby doing the usual baby things when the impulse strikes.

Anyway, anyway, that's my observation of the week. I've got to run. I'm going to message the Southbay Peachhead Moms to find out if anyone knows what's on telly tonight.

Friendly skies

Up until about a fortnight ago, Lady P was a notably chilled out baby. You might almost have called her placid. Sure, she has her moments of wild giggling. And she loves to stampede about on her hands and knees. But she's one of those babies who will lie in her cot chatting away to her toys for a good 45 minutes in the morning. The kind who doesn't squeal if you take away, say, the iphone she's got her hands on, so long as you replace it with a rattle.

More to the point, she was a baby who would sit on TLOML's lap in a cafe, quite content to play with a sugar packet or pepper grinder while we enjoyed a relaxed coffee. And she honestly enjoyed sitting with a book. I'm not sure she fully appreciates the narrative ark of 'That's Not My Lion' but she loves turning pages, saying 'oh' at each turn, and touching different parts of the page in wonder. Her mealtimes were leisurely, if messy, affairs as she worked her way through a range of flavours with interest. She made her own amusement, fairly quietly, in many a confined space. So you can imagine we weren't too worried about travelling with her.

That was up until about a fortnight ago. Now it is a different story. Now she shrieks like a pterodactyl* if anything she wants is not immediately placed within her reach. Mealtimes are a rollercoaster ride of pleasure - when she finds something she likes - and terror, when more of that thing isn't instantly provided. Books are for shouting at, bashing and throwing on the floor. And her favourite game is moving at pace into a place of danger, shouting and shrieking on the way.

They say babies change quickly and everything is 'just a phase'. Please pray that this phase is a shortlived one. Or pity the poor sods who are on an 11 hour flight with our tiny tyrant in a few days time.

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*Actually we don't really know what a pterodactyl sounds like. But if you close your eyes and imagine a high pitched, repetitive shriek... well, you get the idea. It's what we imagine a prehistoric angry bird sounds like.

Our first steps towards independence

There are lots of milestones around at the moment. Lady P is now an advanced crawler and she cruises from coffee table to footstool with ease, so we're sure first proper steps can't be far away. And she already has her first words, at least if 'dadadadada' and 'mamamama' count.

But there's another milestone, which we anticipate with a mix of eagerness and trepidation. It's a first for me and TLOML: a night away without Lady P. We have booked a mini-mini-break, a night away in Edinburgh.

Our plan for the day time is to leave Lady P at my mum's place. She'll have six other grandchildren there, as my three sisters and their families are all in town, so we can pretty much just pop Lady P in and go, safe in the knowledge she'll be a drop in the ocean of chaos. We've spent quite a bit of time there already this Christmas and the babysitting is basically built in because of the sheer number of people in the house. Lady P roams the long carpeted hallway (ours at home is short and wooden-floored, so this is a corridor of luxury) mthrilled by the fact that there are people in every room - cousins, aunts and uncles and grandparents everywhere.

It's great for me. Lady P crawls towards the door, her little bottom wiggling as she gathers pace, and when she leaves my line of sight I just call out 'Can any one see the baby?' So long as I get an affirmative - even if it is from a three year old - I can relax.

Lady P attempts to get in on some gift opening action

And at night, she'll stay at my sister's house, which is just down the street from our place, so we spend a lot of time there as a rule. She'll fall in step with her rufty-tufty twin cousins who are extremely patient as she trails a Godzilla-like path of destruction across their train tracks and Lego cities. She's eaten plenty of meals with them and will be quite happy to join them for bathtime and a bedtime story.

I sincerely hope she then sleeps for twelve solid hours, as she does at home. But I rather suspect being in a travel cot in a different room will mean any periods of light sleep or vague wakefulness could rapidly deteriorate into angry, 'where the hell am I?' crying. I hope not, or at least I hope that my sister calms her down with her usual ease. To offset my anxiety I've spent hours printing out schedules, laying out bathtime, bedtime and morning stuff at my sister's house, and prepping little dishes of food, so my sister doesn't have to do too much. Lady P is pretty easy, but nonetheless, she does require a bit of looking after.

Three years ago, when the twins were just a few weeks old, my sister and her husband were both getting up every three hours to feed them through the night. One night I stayed over and took a shift with each of them, so they could sleep for a full six hour stretch. She still talks about it with misty eyes, as an incredible gift I gave that she could never repay. Well, now its payback time. And it is a coin I can only spend once.

So I will keep my fingers tightly crossed that Lady P is easy, happy and calm, like she is with us. I'll keep then crossed till that first cocktail. After that, we'll toast to the night I did twin-duty, back in 2010, and determine to forget all about Lady P for the evening.

Whatever happened to my cute threshold?

I used to be a cynic. Sarcastic, frequently sceptical, and prone to scoffing. Even a little dark at times. For example, I didn’t used to want to have children because of the dark and terrible world they will be brought into. Then I met TLOML and that whole attitude changed.

At the other end of the spectrum of seriousness, but informed by the same cynicism, I used to despite cuteness. Or if not cuteness – for who could resist a kitten? And what are they if not cute? – then let’s say I used to despise cutesiness*, the artful pursuit of cute. This would include hairbands and bows on babies with little hair. Any kind of ‘Mommy and Me’ clothing or behaviour. And themed outfits or pyjamas. Like a Thanksgiving outfit emblazoned with 'Mommy's Little Turkey' and replete with a turkey on the bottom.

Turkey butt cat botherer. Grrr!

Then along came Lady P. And she is just SO damn cute. My radar is completely shot by her nose wrinkling smile, her excited wiggles and her giggles. That’s my excuse anyway.

So when a dress arrives from an e-tailer with a matching hairband, I might cry in my defence ‘Oh, it came with the dress, I didn’t realise when I ordered it,’ but I go ahead and put that hairband on her. And take multiple photos because I think it’s so, well, cute. 

Ditsy sub-Liberty print matching hairband and dress. Ouch!

Ditto the green cords she has which are very similar to a much loved pair of my own. Sometimes I can’t resist putting her in a top that’s the same colour as mine. And lo and behold we are wearing a Mommy and Me outfit. Yikes.

Double trouble pink jumpers and green needle cords. Aah!

By the way, I call it Mommy and Me because I’ve never seen or heard the expression ‘Mummy and Me’. Does that mean the concept doesn’t exist in the UK? Or isn’t catered for, at least? I suspect so. Sigh. Cynical, sarky old Britain, eh?! Perhaps California, where no amount of schmaltz and saccharine cuteness is too much, is the best place for us after all.

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*With the possible exception of folk art owls (before they were everywhere, too, honest).