Yummy Music [Foals, alt-J, Everything Everything, Haim + Phoenix]

Although I've struggled to cut down on spending in certain areas during my maternity leave (yes, I have a serious Costa addiction), I have really deprived myself of certain luxuries. Along with new clothes, the most noticeable of these deprivations has been music. I haven't downloaded a single MP3.

But in order to cushion the blow of my maternity leave coming to an end, I've treated myself to some shiny new music to listen to during my new commute. They are pretty much all tracks I've been listening to on Spotify already, but laptop speakers aren't known for their quality. I played a couple of tracks in the car today and am actually looking forward to being in the car alone so I can crank up the volume and get the proper sound experience!

The albums I downloaded were alt-J's An Awesome Wave, Foals' Holy Fire and Everything Everything's Arc. These are all relatively new bands to me, but I think each is very special. I fell in love with Foals and Everything Everything the first time I heard them (My Number and Kemosabe were my respective entry tracks for each). alt-J were a little different, as I wasn't sure about Tesselate when I first heard it, and it wasn't until I heard Matilda that I got them.

I tried to download something by Haim too, as I adore the tracks I've heard from them so far. There was only an EP on Amazon so I held off, but it turns out that is all there is floating about just now so I'll probably go snag it. I also keep meaning to get some of Phoenix's newer stuff, as I bought Alphabetical about seven years ago and although I've liked what I've heard of their subsequent releases I haven't got round to actually buying anything.

Phoenix were a LaunchCast radio find. Man, I loved that service, nothing has ever come along to fill the void left when Yahoo stopped it. Yes, Spotify and Last.fm are ok, but they really are just poor seconds. The ratings and recommendations on LaunchCast were so much more on point that anything I've found through the other two services. I think it is because it gave you a chance to rate on a scale, rather than just simply loving or banning, starring or following. LaunchCast got me through my years at Strathclyde uni, and I think I'll always mourn it. But no one else I speak to ever seems to have heard of it...I guess that makes me a total geek an early adopter of the highest, coolest, fingerbangonthepulse order.

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Wedding Dresses + Tablet Favours

I managed to pop into The Wedding Planner yesterday, to pick up a goodie bag I won via their Facebook page.  The bag itself was a little disappointing, as it was pretty much just promotional fliers and some samples, but I know these were left over from their open day so I wasn't expecting much in the way of actual goodies.  One of the samples really stood out for me though - tablet by Alba Favours.  Since the wedding show at Hampden, I have really been drawn to the idea of using tablet in our favours...which was a bit left field given that I actually don't like the idea of edible favours.  But it's quintessentially Scottish, which ties in with the location of our wedding, and D and I are both huge lovers of the stuff so it's also got the personal touch.  And who wouldn't want tablet, it's a total please-all?!  What I liked about this tablet, beyond it's texture and flavour which were pretty damn good, was the fact that it was love-heart shaped.  I've never seen tablet come in anything but cubes or slabs, so this was really very cool.  So Alba Favours are definitely going on the ideas list!

I appreciate that tablet may be a mystery to anyone not Scottish.  So to save any confusion, the tablet I'm talking about has nothing to do with medicine.  Or health.  In fact, it's pretty much the anti-health, being basically made entirely of sugar, condensed milk and butter.  It is brittle but still has a sort of fudgey element, and good homemade tablet is grainy when it dissolves in your mouth (the commercial stuff can be too smooth for my tastes).  I think it goes without saying that is is rich and tooth-rottingly sweet, but it's incredible...especially with a nice cup of coffee.

Anyway, I've gone off in a tangent from what I set out to write.  Although the rest of the goodie bag wasn't as exciting, at least going to collect it finally got me off my bum to book an appointment to look at the dresses in the shop.  They have two Ronald Joyce ones in particular that made my heart kind of flip when I saw them at the recent Loch Lomond Wedding Show (I should warn you that the page has a video that starts on load-up...a video which the back of my head is in!). But I've already done my research and I know designers like Joyce are totally out of my budget.  And I don't mean my financial budget...I could probably stretch to that if I raided the savings.  But my moral budget just screams "are you serious?!  For a dress?  For a dress you wear once?  Really?"  And whilst I know it's the dress...I'm the type of girl who baulks at spending more than £20 on a pair of jeans, even when I know I'd wear them to death.  To spend hundreds or even thousands of pounds on one item - no matter how important an item it has been hyped up to be - is just insanity to me.  The whole wedding industry disgusts me in how willing they are to take advantage of people and encourage ridiculous overspends. Whilst I appreciate that a lot more goes in to a wedding dress than it does to a £5 t-shirt, I am sceptical that the mark-up is relative.  And though no doubt I will feel incredible for one day in £1,000 worth of dress, I would feel pretty crappy afterwards when I realised that the cost of that one outfit could have funded a family holiday.  I have to keep that thought in mind, even when I try on the dress...that no dress could be totally "me" unless it suited my moral ideals as well as my body shape.

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On weaning like a crunchy mama [baby food purees + Annabel Karmel]

Whilst I wouldn't identify as a crunchy mum (especially when it comes to delaying or abstaining from vaccinations...an utterly irresponsible act, which requires a rant entry of it's own), there are definitely elements of my parenting that are at the very least...chewy.  According to this cute quiz, I scored a 37, which means I am "sprinkled with granola" (on a scale of "jello" to "grape nuts").  I use cloth nappies (though I am fast losing patience with my stash of leaky Tots Bots and am not willing to fork out to try different brands), I occasionally wear Mini Milk around the house or on dog walks in a woven wrap, I had a drug and intervention free birth (you could go as far to say that I didn't have a hospital birth, although that last part was not entirely by choice!) and very much support the importance of that approach.  I don't co-sleep with Mini Milk unless he's really unsettled, but I did with Half Pint and the Mini Milk has never slept a night in a room without me.  And beyond parenting I do try to recycle most of our waste, I'm looking at reducing our meat intake, I'm not allergic to second hand items, I really want to switch to more natural cleaning products and in general live a bit of a cleaner life.  But there are a lot of un-crunchy things about how I live and parent as well - I formula feed and use dummies, we have a lot of electronic toys, I believe in discipline and routine, I drive, I like a good burger, I very much believe in medical science and I enjoy a lot of mainstream culture, commercialism and attitude.

But one thing I am trying to be crunchy about is baby food.  The only pre-made stuff Mini Milk has had was some sachets of pure fruit purée I bought when we were away in Mull last week.  I couldn't transport the frozen purées I had at home, and it would have been impractical to try to make some whilst we were away.  But anything else has been either mashed or poached single fruits (banana, mango, pears and apples), puréed single vegetables (sweet potato, carrot, spinach, broccoli, peas) or mixed vegetable purées.  These last ones are from recipes I've been using from Annabel Karmel's Top 100 Baby Purees, which I picked up in an Oxfam bookshop in Oban last week.  When I worked in Waterstones, the parenting section was one of my areas.  In general I used to turn my nose up at the parenting "gurus" whose books I shelved, and I don't think I ever snuck one up to the staff room to read on my lunch break (I was more into the Stitch'n'Bitch books back then...not that I can knit a single row).  Karmel was one of these gurus, and I really did have the attitude that she was making a ton of money off the back of simply telling people to get food, stick it in a blender and then give it to their baby.  And actually, I nearly didn't buy this book the other week for precisely that reason.  But I'm so glad I did.  Whilst I cook most meals from scratch, and enjoy doing so, I don't really have a chef's mind of how to combine flavours and textures myself.  Everything I cook is from a recipe, or at least based on something I've done before.  So I was fine introducing first flavours of single foods to Mini Milk, but I actually don't mind admitting that I needed direction in stepping up the variety...and Karmel appears to be the woman to offer that guidance.  I suppose I should add here that I don't have anything to compare her too...there is nothing to say that the recipes in the free Cow & Gate booklet I got through the post are any better or worse than hers.  But what I've tried so far has been a success, so I'm not going to knock this particular guru.  Especially when her recipes incorporate things I possibly wouldn't have thought to try until he was much older, such as onions and leeks.

I would be curious to know how crunchy other people are though, so if you take that quiz let me know your results!

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