Felix turned ten months
this week, yet in official terms his age is still zero. It’s a funny thing that
for the first year of life, when we go through the most rapid and remarkable
development we will ever experience, our age is classed as nothing. Especially
if you consider that by the time a baby is born it is already over nine months
old.
I mention this as I have
recently been confounded by people making variations on the same remark, with
the inherent expectation that I will agree. ‘Doesn’t it fly by?’ they remark
while shaking their heads with a mournful air, ‘Seems like only yesterday that
Felix was born’. ‘Yesterday?’ I think in bewilderment. ‘Are you mad?’
His short life has been so packed with change, with growth, with discovery,
that I feel a hundred years have passed since he entered the world. From being
born helpless, nearly blind, unable to control his limbs, to being a curious, laughing,
standing, sentient tiny person in ten months seems miraculous to me, and a thousand
markers stand testament to every change. The day he ate his first solid food.
The day he first stood up. The first time he smiled, laughed, got a joke. His
first swim. His first wave. Each new skill is like the tiny dot
of colour in a pointillist painting, and one of the ultimate pleasures of
parenting is to stand back every now and then and see the points connecting
into a painting of infinite beauty and complexity.
For me this richly layered
tapestry of development gives the impression that time has slowed down; every
week offers at least one remarkable change, whilst a month is time enough for
complete transformation. Felix sheds skins like a hyperactive snake, and I gaze
in wonderment as this tiny being takes shape before my very eyes. What I find
fascinating is that although as parents we teach our children and
take great satisfaction from watching them learn, a more mysterious
part of development is those changes that happen independently of any guidance,
that appear spontaneously as their personality begins to crystalise. In the last couple of days Felix has formed a very
strong attachment to an ancient dog-shaped pillow that I have had since
childhood. Its fur is matted and its eyes are droopy with age, but he loves it
nonetheless, and has taken to laying his head on it with an expression of
adoration. Where this passion has come from I have no idea, but this battered
old blue dog has well and truly stolen his heart.
Whilst on the
subject of transformation, a profound change has materialised in Felix’s
sleeping habits. At long last, and after months of disruption, Felix has
started sleeping through the night. Halleluiah and Praise the Lord. I have been
scared to write about it, or even mention it in case there was some kind of
regression, but it seems to be holding. We are now in the third week of sleeping
through and it is marvelous - although with certain drawbacks - for we have
entered the dreaded 5am zone. Oh rude wake up call, I hear you roar. There
have been a couple of 445 wake-ups when I have peered at the time with a sense of compete denial, but thankfully these have ceased and he seems to have
stablised somewhere between five and six am.
Old habits die hard
however, and the night owls have had to undergo their own sleep training.
Previously bedtime in our house has been around midnight, often later. This is
no longer acceptable, and thus a process of adjustment is underway with bedtime
slowly shifting back around the clock. The Mediterranean style nine pm dinners
have gone, as have the eleven o’clock baths. Writing till one am, my most
prized quiet time when the night is still and the mind can freely process and
express the thoughts of the day has been banished, replaced with morning nap
writing. While Felix sleeps peacefully, exhausted from a heavy morning of play
and swings and sometimes an early bike ride – more on that next time – mummy
writes. Or reads. Or just sits and gazes out of the window at the verdantly
green lime tree. The scales have tipped one way and then another, finding their
balance once again, and I am quietly discovering the delights of morning.
I rise with the sun just
peeping over the roofs of the houses opposite, and the air is fresh and clean
and lovely like a crisply laundered sheet. It has been hot recently, proper
midsummer hot, and by nine the freshness of dawn has long evaporated. But in
the early morning, just an hour or so past dawn, the air is redolent with the
scent of promise. While the sun rises warms the earth, browning the grass and heating the sea and ripening
the harvest, our son rises in his cot, his smile beaming out like the rays of
that huge star overhead. Felix greets each new day like a lottery winner
receiving a cheque for £1,000,000. His joy at simply being awake is
startling. He scrambles to his feet, chubby hands gripping the bars of the cot,
and begins his morning exercises of ‘up and down’. Gritty eyed we smile through
the cobwebs of sleep at his face, aglow with happiness and radiant with
wakefulness. ‘Hello world’ he bugles wordlessly from the cot’ ‘It’s a beautiful
day and a beautiful world and I can’t wait to get out there and start enjoying
myself’. And despite my die-hard late-night habits, I find myself in thrall to
his morning zest and energy. The night owl has taken a bite of the early birds
worm, and might even get a taste for it...
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