312 -Malone starts feeding the baby solids, it’s a messy but it doesn’t give you a cough…

Solids. That’s what they call the food you feed a baby after 6 months. That’s a lie. It is not solid. It is mush. It looks like sick in a jar, (or if you want you can spend ages cooking some sweet potatoes, to then watch them eat one ice cube size portion of it, then dribble the same amount all over their face, clothes, chair, walls and floor. If they get it on their hands that’s it, game over, then we are talking - up the nose, in their eyebrows, ears and finally on you. If you are a new mum., black is so not the colour this season,. Baby puke, milk, and ‘solids’ tend to show up pretty well on black. Pretty tough if you’re trying to sport the latest EMO look dressed in black, black and black. I got white baby rice all over my black skinny jeans; it was a panicky few minutes whilst I bobbed the baby on my knee scrubbing furiously with a damp cloth on the other knee. Now that’s multi –tasking. When I was at school, solids were something you smoked. They were much more cost effective than the leaf variety, though they did give you a hacking cough and phlegm the morning after. But hey my parents couldn’t have wished for a better more effective chastity belt. At parties, Whilst my peers were all drinking cider and snogging people called Darren Phillips and Louise Bates and then puking up over people called Sally Jones. (Why do we do remember people from our school life by their first and second names and then as we get older we struggle to remember people’s first names? Must be all the experimenting with um ‘solids’… Anyhoo whilst others were losing their inhibitions, drunk and getting off with each other, I on the other hand would be, yes okay locked in a bathroom with a boy, but totally unable to say anything other than ‘have you got anything to make a roach out of?” Then we’d smoke a joint, mutter a few words in a paranoid haze, the solids totally inhibiting any teenage sexuality we might have wanted to pursue, then we’d leave the bathroom into the chaos of the cider party completely unable to communicate with the oppisete sex. My parents could sleep soundly. How am I going to ensure my daughter doesn’t meet boys too early? And too early is whilst in school! Okay a kiss and a cuddle is part of development, but sex makes babies…if you’re young and can’t support one, you shouldn’t be doing the doo. If you can’t do the time don’t do the crime… I would not advocate smoking cannabis as it took a decade to quit that habit, stealing my motivation for many years. But I do need to think of ways to prevent my teenage offspring from drinking at parties…hmmm perhaps I can encourage her to stay a messy eater,…chewed food all over the clothes and hair is not a good look, that might work…. Personally, it’s certainly working as a deterent for me.