Never one to do things by the book, Babybear appears to be cutting every single tooth in her lower jaw all at the same time. It's rubbishissimo, I've got to tell you. The poor child wakes up screaming in the middle of the night.

Anyway, just another of the downsides of her teething behaviour is that if I screw up mealtimes and am still trying to get dinner on the table at the time when she should be in bed, her tooth pain really starts getting to her. She's hungry, but it's too sore...

So tonight as she painfully tried to eat her cauliflower cheese with courgette and tomato (one of my mum's 70s standby meals) I realised that I had frozen some of the Carbonara-type stuff that we'd had a few weeks ago. Twenty seconds in the microwave took the edge off the cold and I was able to peel off some of the strips of pappardelle (you know, the thick ribbony ones) and hand them over. She went from refusing to eat to demolishing the entire contents of the tupperware tub.

The moral of this story? Be a better, more organised parent and sort out tea earlier, but if you've blown it then some semi-freddo pasta might just do the trick.

Babybear has, as you may know, been using a spoon with some success for a while now. Not for everything, goodness knows, just for yoghurts and soups on days when I'm Feeling Strong.

Anyway, when I've loaded up the spoon she has until recently grabbed the spoon off me and proceeded to eat it/wipe it in her hair/flick it onto the walls. Not so the past week, however... at least not at first...

No, what Babybear has now decided she likes is for Mummy to load the spoon and hold it out, so that she can lean forward and eat off it. Like I'm a blimmin' wine waiter with the first sip of a freshly-uncorked bottle... 'Eez thees to your liking, Mademoiselle?'

If she likes it, then the paw goes out for the spoon, but if not her mouth will forever remain shut to the offending item (most recently a particularly delicious parsnip, lemon and ginger soup). And more than that, at just-turned one year old I appear to have been tricked into spoon feeding her for the first time in our lives.