We are just two weeks away from the birth of our daughter, and my son is making sense of it through dinosaurs. Namely by playing with four triceratopses, roughly equivalent to our own family unit: a large one, Daddy, a slightly smaller one, Mummy, a quite small one, him, and then another very small triceratops, which he calls ‘baby’. He repeats the words we say to him, or the baby, to these dinosaurs, and brings them with him everywhere he goes, most especially for bathing.
I say bathing, but our new house doesn’t have a bath, offering instead a free-standing shower that is extremely – almost alarmingly – large. Seriously, I’ve been to folk gigs in smaller spaces, and its fully enclosed glass door means several people could happily use it at once. Perhaps this was its intended purpose, as a convivial solution to the pain and boredom of showering alone. Why submit to the drudgery of breaking off conversations just because you’ve started to smell, the architect probably thought, when you can invite your poker buddies in for a scrub with you?
