I seem to be getting later and later with my monthly book posts, and my only excuse is that life seems to be busier and busier. It’s coming up to the end of term, which means a plethora of sports days, tea parties, end of year shows with the accompanying need to provide costumes and practise lines, dance routines and songs. We also spent a lot of time campaigning before the EU referendum – sadly to no avail. I must admit to finding the result, not to mention horrible fallout of increased racism and hate crime,  so demoralising and upsetting that I have really struggled to find my writing mojo over the last couple of weeks. I’ve also been a little bit unadventurous with my reading choices, with only two ‘new’ books again this month. It’s lucky that I read so much in February, as it means I’m just about on target, having reached half way through the year on 26 new books! Phew.

Toddler Taming by Christopher Green

Someone gave us this book when Anna was toddler age, but I never really looked at it. The toddler years weren’t particularly difficult with her (or maybe that’s just rose-tinted hindsight) but for whatever reason this had been sitting on my shelf for the last few years, but caught my eye recently. Because oh my goodness, would I like to know how to tame my toddler! She’s almost unfailingly good-natured, but can seem totally feral. She loves to run and jump and climb, but her risk evaluation skills are frankly extremely limited. She is constantly on the move, so much so that even getting her to sit still in her high chair for the duration of a meal is a challenge. When she has consumed just enough to sustain her for the next set of adventures, she has a tendency to throw her plate to one side to indicate she has finished, and then clamber to her feet. Safety harness? Pah. What do we think she is, a baby?

I’m not sure really if the book has left me much the wiser. As Dr Green points out, toddlers, like the adults they will become, have distinctive personalities, and it is impossible, not to mention undesirable, to try and erase those personality traits in order to create a toddler who complies with our notions of what makes life easy. One suggestion to cope with difficult mealtimes was to ensure that everything was totally prepared before you sat down to the meal – table set, drinks prepared, food all ready. What a good idea, thought I, and put the advice into practice at the next meal. Which is why, having filled Anna’s water cup and put it on the table, I came back into the dining room from collecting plates and cutlery in the kitchen, to find Sophia sitting on the table, soaked to the skin, having poured the contents of the water cup all over herself.  Epic mummy fail. I’m not at all sure my toddler is tameable.

Taken at the Flood and Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie

I am passionate about Golden Age detective fiction, and Agatha Christie is arguably its greatest, certainly its most celebrated, proponent so of course I have read these books before. I realised this month however that I didn’t have copies of either of them, and hadn’t read them for several years. Baby brain means, therefore, that I may as well have not read them at all. Unfortunately this goes for anything I read before 2009, which is unfortunate given that I spent 3 years gaining a degree in English Literature, and so know I have read all the classics, even have a very fancy bit of paper to prove it, but have no actual memory of the seminal works themselves. Hey ho, maybe a project for retirement.

I had some money left on the Waterstone’s card my parents had bought me for my birthday, and so treated myself to these two very attractive editions when Sophia and I had our day out in central London recently. And all that I can say is that re-reading them was an absolute pure, indulgent pleasure. For me, Agatha Christie is the literary equivalent of warm bubble baths, cashmere cardies or hot chocolate (and can often be enjoyed in combination with one or more of these), which was just what I needed this rather unsettling month.

The Secret Diary of a New Mum Aged 43 and Three Quarters by Cari Rosen

This is an absolutely hilarious autobiographical account of one new mum’s journey through pregnancy and the first couple of years with her daughter. As the title indicates, she is an older mum, but I should think that mums of any age can relate to most of her anecdotes. Having had a fairly large age gap in between my girls, I don’t have that many local friends with children the same age as Sophia, so there is less of the constant swapping of tales of woe and development milestones than there was when Anna was a similar age. Books like this are great for creating that ‘all in this together’ feeling, and a reminder to see the funny side of parenting a young child.

After the Party by Lisa Jewell

Lisa Jewell is one of my all-time most favourite ever authors. I absolutely love her ability to get inside the head of a huge range of characters, and her imaginative ability to create original and thought-provoking scenarios. Ralph’s Party was her first novel, and I have read it more times than I care to remember. It was my go-to comfort read as a twenty-something Londoner. After the Party picks up the story of the main protagonists, Ralph and Jem, a decade later, when cool inner-London flat-shares and drunken nights out have been swapped for life in the suburbs with two young children. The demands of this have placed an enormous strain on their relationship, and the novel looks at what happy ever after might be like in reality.

I read this when it first came out a few years ago, and to be honest found it hugely depressing, and not at all the uplifting experience a Lisa Jewell novel normally is. It is as brilliantly written as always, but Anna was a baby at the time, and the message I took from it was that it was impossible to have a baby (let alone two babies) and retain a happy, loving relationship and a sense of your own identity. For some reason I picked it up again this month, and enjoyed it a lot more second time. I think the main reason is that I am now more secure in my identity as a mother, wife and writer -it certainly isn’t easy balancing all three elements of my life, but it’s not as impossible as I feared it might be. I also know that, demanding as the sleep-deprived baby and toddler years undoubtedly are, things do get a bit easier, and with an older child there are many more opportunities for reclaiming a bit of time for yourself as well as enjoying  being with them.