This actually started at British-Christmas-at-your-parents-dinner, when in order to keep the Comet satisfied, you handed her a blini to chew on. She ate it. Then she ate another one. Then she ate some sprouts. And some carrots and parsnips. And half a banana.

For Christmas tea she had cucumber and lettuce. Plus another couple of blini. And to be honest, since all you had to do was sit there and scrape the mush off her face and the high chair later, you rapidly revised your opinion of the whole thing.

Thing is, it works because the Comet is a chewer. The Star was never a chewer. In fact, the Star has only really quite recently embraced chewing as a concept for regular use.

You can hear the baby led weaners saying, yes of course, if he was weaned on purees, of course he didn’t chew. But you can safely say that chewing is basically the Comet’s default state regardless of the stage of weaning, including ‘before’.

It’s amazing what a very mobile baby can find on the floor.

Let’s not go too mad though. There’s a certain level of mess into which you are not prepared to descend. So you are still pureeing anything which she can’t get into her mouth relatively cleanly.

Of course, the chewing frenzy might have something to do with the two small teeth poking out of her bottom gums. You are certainly hoping that is the explanation for the Comet’s complete and utter failure to sleep through the night the last few months.

Of course it could be the constipation. Poor girl’s bowels didn’t really recover after you introduced cauliflower cheese and she scoffed a rather larger bowl than was probably wise.

Prunes. What would you do without them?

Writing something you knew would be translated was an odd experience. Especially translated into Russian. You have read a fair number of Russian-to-English texts in your time and many of them have been quite odd. Translated Russian can be brutally choppy, something you suspect the fact that Russians do commas all wrong* doesn’t help with although it’s probably the fault of having both more flexible word order in sentences and some really dauntingly information-packed adjectival phrases. In addition, any attempt to render slang across the language barrier is invariably a horrible horrible mistake.

As a result you have decided that the two languages are fundamentally incompatible.

So you decided to try to make life easier for your translator by eschewing things like the affected ‘you’ and the hyperbole, the overuse of adverbs, and the ungrammatical subordinate clauses made to do the work of a full sentence that you use on this blog. A bit. Still, you are deeply grateful to the person who translated this, who clearly had the bigger job of the two of you.

This is what you wrote:

I first went to Russia in 1996 intending to stay for six months and have never entirely left. Well, that’s not literally true. Right now I live in the UK, but in a corner of London that will be forever Slavic because my husband is Russian and my two children are, therefore, half Russian.

Why Russia? No reason, particularly, except that I wanted to live abroad for a while after university and had a choice between Russia and India.

I really hate hot weather.

I come from a small town about thirty miles outside of London. The most interesting thing about it is that Lewis Hamilton, the formula one driver is from there. It’s pleasant but not terribly exciting and Moscow was a bit of a shock, made more so by the fact that I didn’t speak a word of Russian before I arrived. I learned to read the alphabet while negotiating my way round the Metro stations.

Moscow, you see, is big. There are big buildings, some tall, some just heavily monolithic. The doors are built for giants. The roads have seventeen million lanes (some of them). Parks are like walks in the country, and as you fly into the airport, you look down on miles and miles and miles and miles of forest. It is very disconcerting to realise that Moscow has been built in one rather large clearing.

In fact what with coming from a small island nation, I never have really managed to comprehend properly how big Russia itself is. You have to show three maps just to get the weather forecast done and even then the distances involved are mind-boggling.

In addition, the history is impressively, and sometimes oppressively, huge, and it was a history that Russia was still very much living through when I arrived almost completely (you will have gathered) unprepared. I may be a historian by training, but I specialised in 18^th Century France and Venice.

I survived and refused to leave because I enjoyed finding out everything I didn’t know before I came and because I adore Russian people (and snow). They are warm, helpful, funny, intelligent, determined and practical. Which is why, of course, I married one of them (and miss snow in winter).

In the fullness of time we had children. And at this point, multicultural families often hit problems, not least of which is whose language do you teach them? Or, how do you make sure that they learn both languages? If you don’t want them to, why not? If you do, how well do you want them to speak?

Our decision, when our son was born in 2008 and reaffirmed when my daughter joined us this year, was that we wanted them to be as balanced bilingual speakers as possible, which means that we wanted them to speak (and read, and write) both English and Russian equally well. This presents some challenges again, especially as we live outside of Russia. I do a lot of the childcare and my Russian is brutal and largely ungrammatical (but with a really good vocabulary relating to potty training, weaning and childhood illnesses).

So I will be writing about how my husband and I, with a lot of help from their Russian babushka, are trying to bring those children up bilingually and with a sound bi-cultural understanding of both Britain and Russia as well.

At the moment this seems to involve me watching a lot of Soviet-era cartoons and having my Russian grammar and vocabulary corrected by a three year old.

*Or is it the English speakers?

But you need to be a bit canny about these things. Your big cooking days are 31st December (Soviet Christmas) and the weekend closest to 7th January (Russian Orthodox Christmas). Buy your ready-made brandy butter now and it will have gone off before you even make it into the New Year.

Theoretically this should be a good thing. You can get presents in the sales and nobody can accuse you of being excessively cheap. You can buy up the half price salmon in Tescos on Boxing Day and not have to salt it away in the freezer  until Easter. That kind of thing.

The problem is that last year you left it too late. By the time you had got back from your parents’ there was nothing worth cooking left in the shops. Gammon to make a ham was in particularly short supply. And woe betide anyone looking for chestnuts on the 27th.

When your holidays only start on the 24th December, there you are, full of the glad tidings of the season ready to bound around the shops picking up your festive bits and bobs, and yet there everybody else has stopped. No more Christmas music. No more bells and snow motifs on TV. No more Santa hats on the supermarket elves. No stocking fillers on the shelves either. Nobody pressing you to a complementary glass of mulled wine. Some places even have the decorations down by the end of the 24th. It’s a real buzz killer.

What’s most irritating is that even though this dissonance is brought about by your family being caught up in trying to celebrate customs from elsewhere, it shouldn’t. It is, after all, only a little longer than the twelve days of Christmas. You are the authentic one.

However, trying to bring Anglo-Saxon capitalism to its knees by the power of your disapproval is clearly not going to work, so you have decided this year to start a bit earlier, even if this does mean that by the time you get to the Star’s yolka* on the 8th you will be twitching of you do catch sight of anything red, green or jingly.

But not until ooooooh tomorrow at least.

*A cross between a pantomime and a nativity, except not really. The Star will be a cockerel. You are quite looking forward to finding out whether this is like scoring the pat of one of the Kings or more equivalent to being third sheep from the left in the school Christmas play.

This is perhaps because the Comet has learned to crawl, or rather, slither and you have discovered that her calmness was all a front. She has clearly just been spending the last five and a half months wisely, looking at things she couldn’t reach and making a mental note to head straight for them the minute she got mobile.

The last few days have been characterised by you tripping over a small body as she commandos her way towards another book or toy, or finding her wedged into the space between the sofa and the wall intending to gnaw on a power cable.

She also climbs. She has a good line in reaching up, snagging the edge of the coffee table with one hand, using that to gain purchase with the other and then hanging there, little legs scrambling for grip. Oh and she can damn near get herself into a sitting position too. She lists a bit, and eventually ends up with her nose in the carpet, but it won’t be long before she can do it.

She is, in fact, even more energetic than the Star was, and that was something you didn’t think was possible. Although you will give her the fact that she can be indoors in, say, an art gallery, without needing to shout as loudly as she possibly can, just because it is dark and quiet and she can.

The Star, in contrast, seems to have developed a bit of maturity. You like to think that the Star’s relative calmness these days is due to your water torture approach to discipline.

It seems that somewhere after the five millionth time you insisted on his holding your hand and did the whole right, now we stop at the edge of the read, check for cars, remember not to step out into the road randomly, you don’t want to be squashed like a bug, stop at the road, look there’s a car, it’s a road, stop, look, wait for Mama, it’s a road, there are cars, you might be squashed like a bug, stop, wait, look, wait, stop, stop, stop, SQUASHED LIKE A BUG, stop routine it has actually gone in. The Star will stop at roads now without you having to scream at him and lunge for his collar.  He even roundly told you off the other day for walking in the middle of a (temporarily closed off) road and insisted on using the pavement.

In fact, the Star is entering the age of reason. Or rather, the age where threats, bribes and shameless flattery actually work. Or perhaps it’s just that he’s now over his initial whalelike reaction to the world and is channelling the bowl of petunias*. It’s a lot easier to resist the shiny shiny when it isn’t also quite so new and therefore exciting.

It’s not perfect, of course, but generally his only remaining fault is his tendency to accelerate over the horizon in pursuit of a pigeon. Or a goose. Or a swan. Or any bird that is foolish enough to be big enough to catch a toddle’s eye.

So it is with a rather heavy heart that you realise that just as the Star enters childhood, where you can see the light at the end of the bum-wiping, spoon-feeding, clothes-dressing phase of motherhood for one child, you get to do it al over again with the Comet.

Well, of course you have already been doing it with the Comet, but there’s a big difference between a baby who stays where you put her and one who if you are in the slightest bit attentive will be investigating the contents of the sharps drawer before you know it.

Especially as she climbs.

* 

‘I wanna banana!’ said your son.

‘Sorry, sweets, no bananas today.’

The Star frowned. ‘Apple! Me have an apple?’

‘No apples either. We need to go shopping. How about a satsuma?’

‘Yes!’ Cherubic smile of satisfaction. ‘A sat-suma! I yike sat-sumas.’

There are times when you get to feel really smug as a mother, and when exchanges like this happen at top volume on a busy bus, that is one of them.

You feel justified in accepting the accolades that must surely have been rolling in upon you from your fellow passengers. You put a lot of effort into the Star’s food and eating habits. You do a lot of cooking. You do a lot of cooking from scratch.  Junk food in your house is pelmeni, Russian style ravioli. You even make your own hamburgers.

As a result you have a son who will refuse fish fingers*, can’t stand ketchup, has only recently discovered fruit juice is nicer than plain water, prefers the bitter dark Russian chocolate to the exceptionally sweet Cadburys  and whose favourite foods are apples,** brocoli, tomatoes and home-made chicken noodle soup.*** He doesn’t eat biscuits.  Or puddings. Not even with custard. He prefers fruit. He likes smoked salmon, steamed salmon, salmon and broccoli pasta and has never knowingly eaten a chicken nugget.

Of course, given that you can feel anxious about absolutely anything parenting related, you worry about this. Will he, you fret, rebel when he is thirteen, eat a Happy Meal and then consume nothing but McDonald’s for the rest of his life, die at 45 an obese blob as a result of your failure to desensitize him to fatty, sugar laden foods?

But the thing is, it’s not that you ban these things from his life. Every now and again you’ll make a cake and offer him some. He’ll nibble the icing and demand some grapes. You can’t even get him to eat sausages unless you hide them in toad in the hole, which is a shame as you like them.

In fact, it weren’t for the fact that he doesn’t really want to be adventurous, is steadfast in turning his nose up at stuffed peppers and adores ice cream, you’d be tempted to jack in the cooking and buy in a years’  supply of microwavable dinners to redress the balance.

Anyway. This is relevant because, as well as the fact that it doesn’t do to miss an opportunity for a good boast when you are a mother, you are about to wean the Comet.

Which means breaking out the baby rice and having at her with purees and not giving baby led weaning a chance.

Baby led weaning, for the child rearing fashion challenged amongst us, is where you cover the floor, the walls and any siblings in plastic sheeting, plonk a bowl of (unsalted but otherwise unadulterated) spaghetti bolognaise in front of a seven month old, stand well back and let them have at it. And then give them a bath and nuke the kitchen from orbit.

You would find it amusing, and as the Comet already has a good line in lunging for the nearest banana, or trying to face plant in the Rice Krispies, or flinging herself sideways to go after a piece of flying pasta, you doubt you will be able to resist giving her a spoon and a plate of cauliflower cheese sometime very soon, just to see what she makes of it.

But by and large, you don’t want to mess with the magic formula that has produced the Star and his disgustingly well-balanced attitude towards food.

Plus, there is the issue of the mess.

*Unless he’s at his Granny’s. For some reason he likes fish fingers at Granny’s.

**He ate four today. You are not sure this is entirely healthy. And nearly an entire bag of satsumas yesterday. On the other hand, surely this is better than him eating four lots of sweets?

***OK, and crisps. He doesn’t get to eat crisps very often though, so he has stopped asking for them. You save them for situations that call for really big bribes.

This is not because you are anti-war, anti those/these wars or anti Britain particularly, although some of those are somewhat true.

Remembrance Day in the UK is in some ways a historical anachronism, instituted at the end of a war which saw every family in the UK touched but where the outcome was largely inconclusive, devoid of any real sense of victory and without much material benefit for returning soldiers. The result was massive emotional investment in war memorials and the rituals surrounding them as a focus for the grief of the nation, a nation who didn’t have much to cheer about. This set the tone for the way war has been commemorated in the UK ever since, yet it is noticeable that the Second World War, a war which had some fairly obvious winners and losers, and which resulted in things like the welfare state being set up, did not produce a rash of war memorials. Names tended to be tacked on to the old World War One monuments.*

It’s this almost exclusive focus on the dead that you consider, at best, a little hypocritical, and at worst, rather dangerous.

It’s easy to say, isn’t war awful, look what it leads to, those poor dead boys, wasn’t it tragic, let’s wear this symbol, bow our heads, say we are sorry and feel morally cleansed by our acknowledgement of the horror. You worry that by wallowing in one day’s mourning, we, the non combatants, feel that we absolve ourselves of involvement in the issue of war the other 364 days of the year.

Plus, whilst you appreciate that the day is a comfort to those who have lost family or friends in war, and that this is not an inconsiderable point, nevertheless, the dead are dead. Remembrance Day can’t help them now. You consider that the focus on the dead means we lose sight of our responsibilities to living solders. Where, you wondered, is the day to support the troops currently under fire on our behalf, to celebrate the maimed, the traumatised, the returnees from war?

Well, actually, there is a day of sorts. It’s called Armed Forces Day (formerlyVeterans Day). Anyone know when that is? No, you thought not.

The thing is, you think that history is repeating itself, in that the longer we engage in a protracted, depressing and inconclusive war, the more focus will be put on Remembrance Day, to the detraction of actually doing anything about it, or about the increasing numbers of young men exposed to the unpleasantness who have to come back and try to get on with their lives.

Not to mention the people who actually have to live in areas of conflict.

So you buy your poppy and you wear it. In fact, this year you bought two pin on poppies, two stick on poppies, a Remembrance Day balloon, a sticker and a pennant, because when you discovered that you only had a five-pound note, rather overwhelmed by your largesse and the Star’s obvious excitement, the Royal British Legion‘s representative kept producing new items as you attempted to stuff your money into his collecting tin. You approve of their work.

But you don’t think November 11th is the best day to do our best thinking about war, our roles and responsibilities.

Image via Wikipedia

*You did quite a lot of research once on the meaning of First World War memorials, it bothers you that much. Some of that research ended up here.

But never today.

Image via Wikipedia

You took it out for a walk today (your children came too) and spent a very happy half an hour in an autumnal graveyard taking photographs. With your new iPhone. Hey, it was atmospheric. And the squirrels were obligingly plentiful, which meant you could concentrate on your new iPhone without too many distractions from the Star. You would put some of the pictures here, but you haven’t got round to figuring out how to sync your new iPhone to the computer yet.

You had planned to post to Twitter and Facebook and the like from your new iPhone on the way home, just because you now can, but the Star, who normally cannot be dragged away from the place where you can see trains, today decided that two minutes was quite enough of that and he wanted to get on with scootering.

Since then you have been tapping away at your new iPhone’s screen finding out what all the little icons let you do, marvelling at how controlled the scrolling is, swearing every time you need to type an M on the keyboard and hit delete instead and trying to find an app that converts the keyboard into Cyrillic.

You have even made a call using your new iPhone. To Russia, none the less, using Skype. How cool is that?

Oh and you also made dinner, played with the kids a bit, put them to bed and so on.

And yet here you are, not writing this post on your new iPhone. This is because you have developed cramp in your thumbs.

Maybe tomorrow.