by Matt Coyne
I would definitely recommend baby sensory to anybody looking to entertain their little one. It’s true that, to begin with, it feels like you’ve stumbled into some strange therapy session after ingesting handpicked mushrooms.
But there is method in the madness. In fact, the method is the madness. The great thing about baby sensory is its relentless unexpectedness. For an hour, it is an ever-changing environment. Always interesting. For babies, it is like all the good bits of TV, the attention-grabbing color and sound and light, without being reduced to two dimensions and trapped in a little box. Charlie is enthralled by it because there is no time to get bored with one activity before you are onto the next. And for a creature with the attention span of a cod, that’s ideal.
Messy play
The first rule of messy play is: you don’t talk about messy play.
The second rule of messy play is—what am I talking about? There are no rules.
It’s demented.
Okay, when it comes to kids, there’s no such thing as “tidy play.” From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t matter what age they are, all preadults can turn a perfectly clean and tidy room into a scene of devastation in a matter of seconds. (I remember babysitting for my nephew once. I left the room for one minute and returned to discover he’d crayoned all over the TV, the walls, and the carpet. When I asked what on earth he’d done, he just held up a piece of paper with a crazy scrawl on it and said: “A picture of a cat.”)
So all play is messy, but when you introduce paint, foam, pasta, glue, and glitter, and you remove all rules? You are inviting Armageddon.
I don’t know whether all messy plays are the same, but the one that we go to? There really are no rules. It’s just poster paint, shaving foam, flour, and water, and Christ knows what else, all dumped onto a massive plastic mat. On arrival you just strip your baby down to his diaper and slide him into the mix like he is trying to win a Walkman on J. D. Roth’s Fun House. (If you were born after 1985, ask your parents.) Unlike the other activities we do, there’s no real structure to messy play; the closest thing we got to it at our local class was a different “painting” exercise each week.
There was:
“Painting a Picture”: which was eating paint, while sitting in paint.
“Handprint Painting”: which was eating paint, while sitting in paint.
And “Potato-Print Painting”: which was eating paint, while sitting in paint. With a potato nearby.
Six-month-old babies . . . not big painters.
The hardest bit about messy play is obviously the cleanup. Thankfully, you don’t have to clean up the actual mess, because that’s what you pay your three dollars for. But it is with a heavy heart that you end every session with the painful realization that you are responsible for your own offspring. (It is tempting to just grab the cleanest one and raise that one as your own.) And before you can even contemplate cleaning your own baby, you have to unstick your particular offspring from the block of babies now in the middle of the room. Since during playtime they’ve got all stuck together like Whoppers left in a hot car. Once they’re separated, it’s hard to describe the resultant effects of messy play on your baby. How bad it is. It’s a bit like you’ve coated them in glue and rolled them around on a landfill site.
It’s heaven for Charlie. He loves being messy, and this is a short window of time when he can be. A time when he isn’t being persistently wiped clean, the thing he detests most in the world.
It’s quite sad that as adults we have largely forgotten the simple joy and abandon of all this mayhem (the closest I have been to adult messy play was sharing a kebab-house table with a bachelorette night in Newcastle). But there is fun to be had in seeing your child’s delight in being grotesquely filthy—and besides, unless you turn up with a haz-mat suit and baby-sized tongs, you’re going to get pretty messy yourself. There’s no way of avoiding it.
Just one word of advice: if the baby’s grandparents are looking after the little one the following day, mention to them that there’s a chance that your baby may have ingested a load of multicolored poster paint and glitter. Otherwise, they may spend two hours on the phone to Poison Control in a panic, inquiring as to why junior might be shitting rainbows.
Baby yoga
I’ll admit, I went to this one accidentally. I got the wrong day for baby sign language and turned up at the community center on a Wednesday morning rather than a Thursday.
Rather than do the sensible thing—apologize for intruding, turn 180 degrees, and head off for a bacon sandwich—I pretended I was in exactly the right place. I paid my five dollars and embarked on my only foray into the world of yoga. It was a disaster. Not least because Charlie slept through the entire class.
It is the only time I have felt uncomfortable being the only male participant in a baby activity class. But, I think, with good reason. There is something inherently uncomfortable about being in a class of fourteen Lycra-clad moms (each with her alert baby, yoga ball, and mat) when you are the only man, your baby is fast asleep, and you are sitting there in jeans and a cardigan . . . unconvincingly trying to strengthen your postbirth pelvic floor.
We didn’t go back. I suspect as much to their relief as mine.
Baby swimming
Personally, I can’t remember learning how to swim. I just always could. I must have been taught how, I just don’t remember. In fact, my abiding recollections of swimming as a kid are often haunted by a memory of competing in a swimming meet when I was about nine. I was in a race with six other kids, and we were being cheered on by Richard Ogden’s granddad, who was running along the side of the pool in his trunks. I remember this extremely clearly because the old man obviously had no idea that he had one testicle hanging out of the side of his Speedos. (I can only imagine that while he was excitedly cheering us on, this ancient ball had worked its way loose.)
Needless to say, I didn’t win the race. In fact, I think I came in last. I was quite a good swimmer but just couldn’t concentrate on the finish line with that thing winking at me from the side of the pool like a parched baked potato.
Despite this, on the whole, my memories of spending days and weeks of summer vacation at the local pool are times that I look back on with great nostalgia: the dive-bombing, the hold-your-breath contests, the “no running” walk-run, the fights over plastic floats, the local pervert, “Colin,” and his tendency to sit underwater in the shallow end with his goggles on.
Even memories of the after-swim ritual of chips and a cola from the vending machine evoke feelings of a simpler time when I used to sit around in the café with Paul Johnston arguing about what “heavy petting” might be, before strolling home feeling the effects of the 90 percent chlorine we’d been swimming in (as if we had collective conjunctivitis or were on our way back from a G20 protest where we’d been teargassed by cops).
We didn’t know each other at the time, but me and Lyns actually grew up about two hundred yards from one another. I think we didn’t know each other when we were children simply because boys smell and girls are crazy. We do, though, both have fond memories of our local pool, and we like to think that, although we can’t remember it, we used to scrap over floats and dive-bomb near each other.
It was partly this nostalgia that made us so keen to take Charlie to swimming classes. It would be great to think that he would come to enjoy the childhood friendships and fun of swimming as much as we did during our long summer vacation. (Minus Colin and the potato.)
Plus, it struck us as common sense to make sure that he was safe around water. (And if we could get him to swim underwater and re-create the Nevermind album cover, then so much the better. Loads of people I’ve spoken to got interested in their baby swimming purely because of that cover. Which seems a strange legacy for a tortured soul like Kurt Cobain. Maybe if he’d known he would make such a great contribution to infant water safety, he wouldn’t have been such a Debbie Downer.) So we enrolled in baby swimming classes as soon as Charlie was old enough.
Most animals—cats, dogs, monkeys, even pigs—are born with the ability to swim, but humans aren’t. Before our first class, I was suffering from the common misconception that babies are natural swimmers. I was wrong. Lesson number one: babies sink.
Babies do have something called a bradycardic response, though, which basically means that they instinctively hold their breath when underwater. Which is useful, because, to begin with, handling your baby in water can be tricky. It’s quite alarming how often you feel the need to sidle up to someone in your swimming class who is accidentally holding their baby beneath the waterline. (It’s an awkward tap on the shoulder when you have to follow it up with: “Er, excuse me, sorry to bother you, but your baby’s drowning.”)
So at this age, babies (or at least those in the newborns’ class) don’t swim. There are no tiny six-month-olds doing laps and tumble-turning as they switch from the crawl to the butterfly.
Instead, baby “swimming lessons” are largely made up of exercises that involve sing-alongs and splishing and splashing, holding on to the side of the pool, and other simple routines that are designed to get your baby accustomed to being in the water without fear.
Then there are the more weird exercises. Like the one that involves placing your little one on a float and pushing him away from the side of the pool. An exercise that makes it feel like you’re committing your child to a Viking burial at sea. (The first time we did this, I half expected a flaming arrow to come flying over my shoulder and set the whole thing on fire.)
But apart from the exercises that teach water safety and those that are evocative of sending your baby on a noble fiery path toward Valhalla, the hardest exercise is the “underwater swim.”
Again, these aren’t really swims. It is more dunking than swimming. The first time they “underwater swim,” it amounts to you saying, “Ready, steady, go,” and then plunging the baby underwater like a donut into coffee, before scooping him back up again. And if you think that this would freak a baby out . . . you’d be right, as when he reappears he tends to do so coughing and spluttering and with a confused look in his eyes directed at you that says: “What the fuck are you doing, you idiot??”
It’s tough, that first time. That look of panic and confusion. But it’s amazing how quickly babies get used to the idea of being dunked and even start to enjoy it. In the beginning, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that you’re doing something against your better instincts—the tiny seconds that they spend beneath the water feel like an age.
But Charlie now enjoys swimming more than anything else. And after several months of classes, he has no fear of water and is even starting to propel himself through the pool like an incredibly slow and wayward torpedo. Strangely, one of the main things he enjoys is drinking the pool water. At home, we can’t get him to drink more than two sips from a sippy cup (it just gloobles everywhere like he’s had novocaine); but put him in a pool that is 50 percent baby pee and 50 percent chemicals, and he glugs it like it’s Fanta. Though the thing he really enjoys is the other kids, the way they splash each other and shout in the echoes of the pool area. And as long as he enjoys all that, we’ll put up with the suspiciously warm water and keep on dunking.
The Penistone and District Historical Society
The Penistone and District Historical Society is a group of twelve retired men and women who get together every Tuesday morning, at a community center near where I live, to chat about the history of my village, Penistone.
Okay, so, I got the wrong fucking day again. But the historical society members were lovely, we had homemade lemonade and cookies, I found out why the Penistone train no longer runs to Broadbottom or Gorton, and I also won some deodorant in their weekly raffle.
* * *
So, if you’re keeping score: baby sensory, swimming, raving, messy play, and the Penistone and District Historical Society’s weekly meeting are all great ways to entertain your baby away from home. Baby sign language is okay (if you have the patience and brains for it), and baby yoga is shit.
And none of them get even close to peekaboo.
THE CURTAIN
It’s hard work entertaining a baby. And for what? We are told that it’s important for cognitive development and the familial bonding process, or whatever. But the payoff isn’t in educational attainment or development; it is in a baby’s chuckle or smile. And if you think that sounds like something Oprah would say, it’s actually science, you cynical shit. Studies show that a baby’s smile and giggle activate areas in the parent’s brain like the “striatum” and the “ventral tegmental” (and other complicated bits of the brain with names that sound like Harry Potter casting spells), and these are the oddly named bits in your skull that apparently light up like a pinball machine when you’re happy.
So as parents I think it’s best to get happy. And activate our “ventral tegmental” while we can. For now, the fact that I disappear when I hide behind my hands makes me a great magician. But it will not be long before Charlie realizes that I never disappeared at all, that I was there all along. Just as one day he will realize that I don’t have the ability to produce a coin from behind his ear, and that I haven’t snatched his nose but simply tucked my thumb behind my forefinger.
So we’ll get down on all fours, make faces for all we’re worth, and peekaboo like fuck. And bask in the glowing reviews of our little one’s smile. Because one day the spell will be broken, the curtain pulled back, and our career as the greatest entertainer in our child’s life will be over. Forever.
* * *
I. Nonce is British prison slang for a pariah among criminals, usually a sex offender or an informant. It’s an acronym for“not on normal communal exercise” and should always be said with a thick cockney accent.
9
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MILESTONES
It’s incredible how a baby’s milestones mirror those of human evolution. Just as in our prehistory, when our ancestors were formed in a primordial soup, took their first infant crawl onto land, and learned a basic grunting communication before finding the ability to walk upright.
So, too, babies leave the alchemy of the womb behind to take the same evolutionary steps: the ability to crawl, walk, and talk, and all in their first months of life.
. . . Actually, now that I think about it, as incredible as it is that a baby’s milestones are the same as the evolution of man, I’m really hoping that those milestones stop being so similar. Because the next steps for man were to discover fire, learn how to use a spear, and fuck over the nearest tribe for their women and livestock.
MILESTONES
* * *
Dear Charlie,
So, it occurs to me that one day you will be all grown up and you might actually read this book. (Maybe you’ll discover it in an old bookshop or, if nobody buys it, you might stumble across one of the twenty thousand copies we keep in the garage.)
With that in mind, I thought, in this penultimate chapter, I’d take this opportunity to tell you a bit more about what you were like during your first 365-day orbit around the sun. Take this chance to tell you how you met your milestones, those little markers by the road that define the first year of all of our lives. How you made your first word, your first step, things like that.
Sit up straight.
MILESTONE NO. 1: HOW YOU GOT YOUR NAME
So, when your mom was pregnant, we went along to the hospital for a six-month scan. This is the scan when the nurse can detect whether the parents are having a boy or a girl. We didn’t want to know. We wanted you to be a surprise. You don’t get many surprises as an adult, and when you do they tend to be shit, like a speeding ticket or jury duty or a suspicious lump. It’s not like being a kid when everything is good-surprising, so we kept this one for ourselves. And to be honest, at the time, we didn’t care whether you were going to be a boy or a girl anyway.
> (I know everybody says that, but we really didn’t care. At an earlier scan, the same nurse asked me directly whether I preferred a boy or a girl, and I trotted out the stock response, which is: “I don’t mind, as long as the baby’s healthy.” And that’s genuinely the way I felt. But this particular nurse was quite pushy; she said: “Oh, everyone says that! What if I could wave a magic wand, what would you want?” So I thought, and then told her: “I would probably go for something with Professor X’s mind, but with Wolverine’s healing capabilities.” She just looked at me like I was insane. I thought: Christ, you’re the one with the magic wand, love. . . . ).
Anyway, the scanning nurse covered up any telltale (or tell-tail) signs of whether you were a boy or a girl, and you remained neither boy nor girl until the day you landed.
Because we chose not to find out whether you would be a junior or a junioress, our first milestone was to give you a name. Deciding on a name before you got here was awkward—we didn’t really want to settle on “Bernard” or “Troy,” only to discover that we had a little princess on our hands. Likewise, we didn’t want to set our hearts on “Penelope,” and find that we had a little boy (who, if you were to take after your mom’s dad, would grow to be a six-foot-four man, with hands like shovels and a build that calls to mind a brick shithouse).
I don’t think it’s just us who have had this problem. I think, for a lot of parents, naming their little one is quite difficult. Even if parents-to-be decide to find out the sex of their baby (or are organized enough to set aside options for both boy and girl), it’s not necessarily straightforward to find a name that both mom and dad agree on. It’s a strange thing about names: we attach associations to them, both positive and negative, and we do it all the time. For example, if your school bully is called “Glen,” it’s unlikely you’ll want to give your firstborn the same name. And if the girl who first broke your heart was named “Sally,” likewise you won’t want to be reminded of that each time you call your kid to dinner. The problem is, your partner’s school bully might have been called “Frank,” and the person who broke their heart was “Terry.” So you fast start to run out of names that are agreeable.