My daughter scans the television, unhappy with the babyish options – her usual favourites – and demanding new ones instead. She’s growing older, and since we do not plan to continue growing our family, there is a sense of a ladder being pulled up behind each milestone as it passes. I’ve heard some parents describe this process in a melancholy way, but I feel more than ready to leave babyhood behind.
As just one example, I regularly entertain fond daydreams of scrapping her buggy. She inherited it from my son, so it is now more than six years old and one of the most disgusting objects I have ever owned. Knowing she’ll have grown out of it within a year, we are too miserly to spend £400 on a new one, so we simply try to use it as little as we can. She is still, however, occasionally conveyed via a contraption you wouldn’t use to transport a farmyard animal.
I’ve changed two wheels and sanitised it head-to-toe on many occasions. Its black upholstery has been worn to a grisly shine and there are powdery stains across its every connector that no amount of cleaning has ever managed to remove.
It’s the same make and model as that of almost every other parent in east London and, years ago, this led to the sort of good-natured misunderstandings common to nursery pick-ups, and at least two occasions on which I left the premises with someone else’s. This, I can assure you, no longer happens. No one could possibly mistake our buggy for any other in a parking area. Theirs all stand identical, as comically pristine and rigid as factory models, perfectly tessellating in showroom perfection. Ours slumps and sags so that it sits an inch shorter than its fellows.
When my daughter finally has no need of it, we will take great joy in removing it from our lives. My preference would be a funeral pyre, so we can watch as departing ghosts escape its husk, screaming from the pain of freedom in the manner of souls ejected from the ark of the covenant in Indiana Jones.
We won’t miss teething or bottles or the uncertainty of all our sleep cycles – aspects of babyness that prohibit us from being too sentimental about her growing up at all. But other milestones passed feel more bittersweet, like her choosiness with TV.
She no longer wants to watch soporific toddler fuel, like Moon and Me and In The Night Garden, preferring the more narrative-focused adaptations of Julia Donaldson’s Gruffalo and Stick Man. On YouTube, the Day-Glo charms of Ms Rachel and Baby Shark are out, replaced now by Shaun the Sheep.
I finally feel a pluck at the eyelid from the knowledge that her infancy is departing. She’s come a long way. Given that she spent so much of her journey in that heap of junk, we should be thankful she got here in one piece.
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