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.
