Although I might make up a list of my own that ends up having more titles in bold 
Look at the list of (100) books below.
Bold the ones you’ve read.
Italicise the ones you want to read.
Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in.
Movies don’t count.
1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)
When I first started getting cross easily, I put it down to exhaustion from not sleeping. Then I wondered why I wasn’t sleeping and thought that maybe the rage and the insomnia were both being caused by the same thing. Gill suggested that it might still be exhaustion. Now Mum had suggested a thought as to why I’m not sleeping and I now think that the anger is caused by tiredness. Not sure how I’m going to get sleeping though if this is the reason:
A few weeks ago Dh spent the night have horrific dreams - really upsetting. Each time he woke, he said, he saw a figure in the doorway…not a sinister figure. Eventually Dh woke me up to tell me about his dreams, in an attempt to take his mind off them. I did as I automatically do every single time I wake and put my hand onto Cotton-tail’s tummy to see if she is breathing. She wasn’t. I screamed and grabbed Cotton-tail and gave her a shake. She opened her eyes and grinned at me. Dh and I spent the next hour crying, then playing with Cotton-tail, then helping her get back to sleep. Dh had no more nightmares and the ‘figure’ had gone. Was the figure Cotton-tail’s guardian angel? I believe so. I believe he was keeping Dh tossing and turning in his sleep to disturb Cotton-tail and keep her breathing.
However, it does appear to be since that night that I haven’t been able to sleep, having only had a handful of nights when I can. The nights I can sleep are getting slowly more frequent. If that’s the reason, I guess I just have to be patient and wait until peaceful sleep returns to me as my subconcious gets more confident that Cotton-tail is safe.
Last night was one of our bad ones. In a fury I wrote a very honest and angry post and then deleted it a couple of hours later. I’m a bit annoyed I deleted it because I personally feel it would be much easier to parent if everyone were honest about the times parenting is crap. When I post these sorts of things, I invariably get lots of supportive comments and emails from people telling me I’m not alone…so why don’t I read about other parents having a tough time? Maybe we should have a tagging thing about the hard things about parenting…or would it end up being too depressing? Anyway, for anyone who didn’t read the post last night, it was about the inevitability of our children deciding that last night was the night they would stay up very late being as last night was the first night in ages that DH and I had a secret plan to stay up watching Chicago. I got very cross and angry and had to run away into the kitchen to type out my frustrations. People have said ‘lack of bedtimes and time for me to be with my partner is one of the reasons we don’t do TCS’ but TCS is firmly against anyone self-sacrificing, including parents. So…we’re not getting right. We are struggling and struggling to find a common preference…a solution that suits everyone. We let the children stay up and play and they get to a point where they want to go to bed. That’s fine - we enjoy spending time together as a family; time Dh wouldn’t get otherwise as he works relatively long hours. However, we are then too tired to stay up together any later usually as Dh has to get up very early for work and I wake several times in the night to deal with babies (and I’m suffering from insomnia anyway at the moment). Today Dh has the day off, so we thought we could be adventurous and stay up beyond 10pm last night to watch a dvd and spend some time just the two of us. Stupid plan because the children used their special telepathic powers to know we had a plan and, after starting off normally going to sleep, suddenly decided to get up. Which was when I lost my temper. In the end Dh got them to sleep by 10pm and we decided to stay up anyway, getting to bed by 12.30am - way later that usual.
Having written all that, last night I managed to get to sleep no trouble, and had no long awake periods in the night and we all woke naturally around 9am-ish so maybe staying up late the night before Dh’s days off is a solution. Ideally, I’d like to be able to watch more grown-up tv, but that’s just not going to happen at the moment and I’m quite enjoying our more leisurely evenings when we don’t have a bedtime battle. Let’s see how things go.
My darling Mopsy has decided it’s time to sort out the pecking order in our household :-( It’s not much fun. She’s not being awful to Cotton-tail, but she completely ignores me when I ask her to keep being gentle and occasionally hurts her. She’s always sticking her feet in Cotton-tail’s face, or dragging her around the room, or prodding her. It makes me crosser than anything else the children do…which is probably why she does it! Parenting a 2.5year old is SOOOOOOO demanding! Constantly trying to ease frustrations for them, helping them cope with meltdowns, supporting them while they try to do everything themselves and trying not to get cross when they get angry at you if you dare to try to help. I love her to bits, and her total and utter cuteness more than makes up for the tough bits. She has a great sense of humour, is a very kind and generous person and, most of the time, really looks out for Cotton-tail and Flopsy. She removes things that Cotton-tail shouldn’t have (stray pieces of paper, small toys etc.) and kisses her if she gets upset. She sings to her and if she happens to do something that makes Cotton-tail laugh, she’ll keep on doing it to please her. She copies everything Flopsy does, to the extent of trying to say what Flopsy’s saying to us at the same time as her, resulting in a kind of mumble, while looking sideways at Flopsy and then repeating the last word of the sentence - a little echo :-) However, she also will often snatch whatever Flopsy’s playing with, unless there is one each, just because Flopsy’s got it. Flopsy’s so patient with her but often eventually snaps and hits her. When I come to sort it out, she says to me “I tried to sort it out with words, Mummy, but Mopsy just hit me” - I have to stop myself laughing out loud, of course. And when Mopsy’s in her frustrated-two-year-old mood, I just get crosser and crosser. I try to be patient and understanding for as long as I can, but when her behaviour is upsetting one of the others I just find it so difficult to deal with. I know all the theory. I know what I ought to be saying and doing, but keeping my temper in check so that I actually do it and at the same time placating Flopsy or Cotton-tail (whichever one has been the brunt of Mopsy’s 2.5-year-old-ness), is so, so difficult. This is not to say that Flopsy is perfect…far from it…but Mopsy’s the hardest work at the moment. The other trouble is that she’s so bright for her age, and her speech is fantastic, that it’s very easy to forget how old she actually is and expect too much from her…being advanced can be a real hindrance in some ways. Poor Mopsy…her frustrations are totally understandable, it’s not her fault, and she is a very lovely girl. She offers other people her food, cleans up mess, cuddles people when they’re upset, sings beautiful songs, and helps build ikea furniture:
and is very, very good friends with her big sister:
Mopsy the rabbit (oh! Just realised that Mopsy is a bunny in the actual story! Ha ha!)
Flopsy the sky
Flopsy the clown
Mopsy the lion
Flopsy the zebra
And to celebrate, here’s my favourite pic ever, in the whole wide world, ever! Photos of Flopsy’s birthday to follow soon…
I did my response to the proposed home education guidelines. The Freedom for Children to Grow website has more details and information about the guidelines and how to respond. I was respondent number 144. If you feel anything about the rights of parents to home educate their children the way they see fit, please respond to this consultation. The deadline is the end of this month (July 31).
The natural learning processes of babies and children is of endless fascination to me. Observing it makes me more and more keen on autonomous education and I feel very certain that we will continue our parenting philosophy of being led by our off-spring forever 
Cotton-tail is currently learning how to eat solid foods. As regular readers of this blog will know, we unintentionally did ‘baby-led weaning’ with Flopsy (she refused anything off a spoon except yoghurt) and, having learnt more about it, did it on purpose with Mopsy. Cotton-tail is now 6.5 months and has been joining us at the table in her tripp trapp high-chair (no tray) for a few weeks (of course she’s been with us at mealtimes since she was born, but usually sleeping in someone’s arms or wriggling on someone’s lap). She is learning to eat in this way:
1. Learning how to pick up food, and, more specifically, learning how to pick up different types of food. She loves it that cucumber slides around and feels cold but that potato mashes up in her hand
2. Then she has learnt how to get it into her mouth. Her hand control has developed enough for her to make sure she picks the food up in such a way that there is enough food ‘visible’ to get some into her mouth. She is also starting to learn how to put food from one hand into another to make it more accessible.
3. Next she is learning how to bite pieces off what she’s got in her hand - a very pleasing experience, particuarly when every food does different things: Brocolli kind of breaks up into tiny little pieces which feel very interesting in her mouth; pasta feels slippery
4. Her current plan is to master the art of moving food around in her mouth with her tongue. Lots of gagging involved in this phase; and spitting food out onto the table, but she’s getting there.
5. The next thing she has to learn is how to mash the food up so it’s easy to swallow. We’re beginning to see less food on the floor after mealtimes so I’m guessing she’s doing this a little already. Her poos have yet to change, though, so she’s obviously not doing it very much!
The theory suggests that all this falls into place at about the same time her gut is ready to digest it all effectively and safely, when it’s less permeable to allergens and bacteria. I don’t need to worry about her lacking in nutrients due to the lack of solid food intake because she’s still breastfed on demand. If she’s anything like her sisters, by the time she gets to 8 or 9 months she’ll be eating food like her Daddy (albeit a bit messier!).
Mopsy is currently learning how to settle herself in the night. Flopsy is the only one of our babies to experience any sleep-training and that only consisted of a grand total of two minutes controlled crying and a week’s worth of patting/rocking to sleep at 5 months old in the misguided belief that it was bad for her to learn to fall asleep at the breast. When we stopped all that nonsense, life got much easier and, miraculously, Flopsy has been falling asleep without breastfeeding for at least 18 months and sleeping right through the night most nights; only needing a loo visit and a cuddle to settle if she does wake.
Mopsy is doing exactly what Flopsy did. Breastfeeding no longer gets her to sleep. It does switch her mind off and start the process, but the action of suckling now keeps her from falling fast asleep most of the time. So we feed, and then she rolls over and falls asleep herself while I cuddle her (when evenings work out well, that’s what happens - I won’t go into that whole thing now, though!). Most of the time when she wakes in the night (two or three times), she now rolls over mumbling a half-hearted request for a breastfeed (yak yak, she calls it) but falls asleep before I get to feed her.
The next step will be settling before she even asks for milk. However we’ve upset the process a bit now by decorating their room for them and pushing the two single beds together. They now both want to sleep in there, which is lovely for them. And it’s very pleasing to me to note that when Mopsy does wake, she doesn’t cry for me - she’s not scared of not sleeping next to me - she just calls ‘Mummy’ and me or DH go and get her and bring her back into our bed where she settles very quickly. It does mean that she’s woken up more than she would if she were stirring next to me so she does need feeding to get back to sleep.
When Flopsy did this, it was the start of the weaning process…maybe I’ll start thinking about weaning Mopsy but I don’t really feel like I want to like I did when Flopsy was this age. Mopsy is much happier than Flopsy was to have feeds that last a few seconds (more a cursory checking in with me, than an actual need to feed); and she doesn’t ask as much as Flopsy did. We’ll just see how it goes for now.
Flopsy is currently having a ‘learning to read’ phase. She’s had lots of these during her life so far. The early ones were things like a desire to learn her letters; or wanting to sit with me with a book and tell me her own version of the story; or asking me to point out the words in whatever book I’m reading and tell her what they say. At the moment she’s bringing books to us and asking us to read the words with her. Her favourite book ever is one she discovered a couple of years ago at the back of a bookcase. It’s called Daily Light and is a collection of Bible readings - one for every day of the year. Now no one could describe us as devoted Christians, but I’ve been brought up a Christian and my Grandparents would love it if we went to church regularly and read the Bible. They gave me this book when I was 15. It’s small - about 8cm wide; 13cm tall and 2cm thick and Flopsy has fallen in love with it. It has proper thin pages like a Bible has, which I think appeals to her. We’ve never read to her from it, so she has no idea what it says (I think!), but she loves it - ‘reads’ it when we’re reading our books in the evening etc. At the moment she often brings it to me asking me what the words say - she doesn’t want me to read it to her, but wants me to point to the words and if she knows them she reads them and if she doesn’t, I do.
She’s also very keen on reading one of the bedtime stories they choose every night and that’s really enjoyable. We have a collection of Puddle Lane books - mostly bought from car boot sales to satisify my nostalgia! - and she is also really enjoying reading those with me. I read the adult’s side of the page; then she reads the child’s side; then she gets bored and wants me to read it all.
These reading bouts take place randomly during the day and very frequently happen at 10pm when we’re reading in bed before going to sleep. Another reason to be glad she won’t be going to school - she can learn to read in her own time and whenever and whatever she likes
PS. All three girls are also learning heaps of other things all the time, of course, but these things seem to be what they’re focussing on at the moment.
