Peanut butter turns me to jelly

Having taken the perilous step into motherhood, I am, clearly, now a bona fide super-heroine. I find it somewhat surprising, in fact, that the hideous paper disposable briefs that women supposedly wear during labour have not long since been discarded in favour of scarlet or black Lycra versions. Hospital gowns should be replaced with capes (it's not like the gowns preserve our dignity anyway) and eye masks should...well perhaps I'm getting a bit carried away.

The point is, overnight you turn into this person who is somehow supposed to know all the answers, to know how to parent, to keep on top of a child's development. I honestly have no idea how mothers maintained the super-heroine illusion in the pre-Google world. If you're anything like me, you read books, stalk forums and obsessively sign up to parenting emails. You know the ones - they tell you what your baby is going to start doing each month, turn you into some crazy person watching to see if they do it and then make you go a bit nuts worrying over whether they've technically missed a 'milestone'.

I have done more than my fair share of worrying. Remember how I worried about Little Monster's eating? Yeah, he's pretty much a walking dustbin since he started going to nursery. My more recent worrying has been focussed on Little Monster's movement, or lack thereof. He'll be a year on Wednesday and as I watched the last few months go by, he watched me from the same spot on the floor. The only change was that his expression became more reproachful that I had the nerve to leave him there. This week it's been all change in Little Monster's world. He started pulling himself up at nursery and doing a sort of commando crawl. He's also getting much more confident in taking a few steps by himself. Any sane person, (anyone except his mother, that is), can probably see that there is clearly nothing wrong with his motor development.

See what I mean?

All of this is actually a roundabout way of saying that I'm very grateful to have hubs here to keep me on the straight and narrow. He can see what my mother's eyes can't and he tosses out the books and the forums and the emails in favour of good old intuition. When I arrived home the other day to find hubs feeding my nearly 1 yr old son peanut butter for the first time, my first instinct was run around the kitchen waving my arms in panic about some kind of nut allergy. In fact, just like his motor skills, Little Monster was taking it all in his stride. Just goes to show, I'm not a super-heroine after all. But if I keep wearing my mask, maybe, just maybe, noone except hubs will notice.