We were at a restaurant and Mia was distracted by a flickering light on the ceiling.

‘Light flashing!’ she said.

‘Yes, Mia.’

‘Light still flashing!’ insisted Mia. She thought for a second. ‘Man fix?’

‘Good idea, Mia,’ I said. ‘Maybe a woman might fix it?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Mia nodded sagely. ‘Woman. Woman with ladder.’

I was struggling to get pyjamas on an overexcited Mia when she took a massive bite of my arm. I screeched and slapped her.

Damjan came running into the room holding Lana, who he was trying to put to bed.

Consequences were swift. Damjan took over Mia’s bed time routine and I took Lana.

Mia cried as her beloved mummy disappeared. ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mummy…’

Later that night, Damjan said that he asked Mia, ‘Do you know what happened? Why did mummy go away?’ Mia didn’t say anything for a while but eventually admitted, ‘Mia ate mummy.’

Damjan said Mia will apologise to me tomorrow.

Having had her nappy changed for the evening, my toddler Mia was watching as we put 5-day old Lana on the change table.

The action started when I took off the newborn nappy. Having not poo’ed for two days, the liquid brownish yellow volcano erupted. Spurt! Spurt! Spurt!

‘Oh!’ I said, as the soup poured onto the change table mat. ‘It’s poo!’

Mia looked on in horrified fascination. ‘Poo! Poo!’ Then Mia started crying.

My resourceful husband stepped in. ‘Yes, Mia, that’s where poo comes from, remember your body book? You eat the pear, it goes down your throat, into your tummy, then comes out as poo?’

He whipped out the book from the book shelf and tried to distract an increasingly hysterical toddler while I struggled to contain the mess.

‘She’s vomiting,’ I exclaimed, as yellow curds tumble out of Lana’s mouth. ‘She’s throwing up!’

Damjan managed to taken an overtired Mia away and sit her down with her bedtime books. ‘Can you manage?’ he asked. ‘Sorry that my hands are tied.’

‘I think I can,’ I mumbled. ‘AARGH! Wee! Wee!’

Lana looked oblivious as poo, wee and vomit come out every hole. At least she wasn’t crying.

A while back, we noticed that Mia didn’t want to drink bottles of breastmilk that I had painstakingly prepared. At first, we thought it was because she didn’t like drinking from bottles. We changed the bottle teat. We tried when she was less tired. Sometimes she would drink it, sometimes she wouldn’t.

Finally we tasted the milk ourselves. Freshly expressed breastmilk was mild and sweet. The milk that we had thawed from the freezer was horrible.

I felt awful. We had been trying to force horrible tasting milk into Mia’s mouth!

So, we ditched the ‘liquid gold’. I had no qualms about it. It’s hard work to build up a stash of breastmilk but there was no way I was going to feed it to Mia.

Why did this happen? Somewhere between expressing, freezing, storing and thawing, the taste of the milk changes.

I read around the topic on the internet. Some women’s breastmilk has too much lipase (an enzyme), which means that breastmilk starts changing in flavour within a few hours of storage. This is not what happens to my milk. Mia is happy to drink milk that has been refrigerated for a few days.

Another theory that sounded promising is to do with the way frozen breastmilk is stored in the freezer. The freezer has a defrost cycle, so if milk is stored on the ‘floor’ of the freezer, it might defrost and refreeze a little each time the freezer does a cycle.

To test this, we made three samples of milk. One was refrigerated. Another was stored on the floor of the freezer. The other was stored on the freezer shelf. After three days of storage, I also expressed a fresh milk sample to add to the experiment.

It was a single-blind taste test. I knew which sample was which and Damjan did not. Here are his notes.

It turned out that thawed breastmilk tastes like coconut! Also, all samples were drinkable and close to indistinguishable.

Our next theory was that it was the age of the breastmilk that mattered, rather than the storage method. So for two weeks, every second or third night, I made a breastmilk sample and froze it.

Last week, we got to do another blind taste test.

Alas (or hooray?), all samples were equally drinkable. The age of the milks did not seem to relate to how strong the flavour was. Damjan wasn’t able to rank them by age.

So we haven’t really gotten to the bottom of it.

At least we know that we can freeze milk for at least two weeks. In fact, on Monday, we sent Mia to childcare with a bottle of thawed 16-day old milk and she drank all of it.

We were changing a very tired baby last night and she started screaming hysterically. It’s not like her at all. Then out of nowhere we heard music.

‘What’s that?’ I thought maybe I was imagining it.

‘Is it your phone?’ said Damjan.

‘Sounds like… lullabies…’ I said, holding down flailing arms as Damjan tried to thread them through the sleeves.

‘Like the cot mobile?’

We stared at the cot mobile, which wasn’t lit up or spinning as it normally is when it’s on. I leaned in to listen.

‘It is from the mobile!’ I was astonished.

‘It must turn on when the baby cries.’

‘That’s crazy! I’m looking that up on the internet.’

Sure enough, the VTech cot mobile I bought for $20 off Gumtree, without instructions, has a sound sensor that turns on soothing music when a baby wakes up and cries.

For nine months thick hair was my friend.
Then bub arrived and that did end.
Wherever I go, there’s more and more
Hair on clothes, the shower, the floor.

Hair, hair, everywhere!
On couch, on toys, the bed, the stair,
Despair as hair fills every gap.
Clean up? Forget it! I’d rather nap.