Walk the walk: on baby milestones

This weekend we were at my parent’s house near the beach, and on Easter Sunday we all went down to the pier. It was, to everyone’s surprise, a beautiful day, so we took Eliza out of her pram to have a walk around by herself.

She took a few tentative steps at first, gripping our fingers in each little hand, but then toddled off across the boards with us in close pursuit. The waves broke beneath our feet, the sun shone overhead. Eliza had the most ridiculously proud look on her face. We were all beaming.

What was your favourite baby milestone? I’ve loved them all, of course, and each new one eclipses the rest, of course, but there’s something so brilliant and the most amount of fun about seeing her make her own way around on her two tiny feet. I’m not sure how it’s so much better than sitting, or crawling, or cruising, but it is. 

It’s a bittersweet joy, too; where did you go, tiny newborn? Who replaced you with this miniature person, this amazingly mobile toddler?

So much time in the first year is spent keeping them fed and clothed and changed and napped. And on nights and nights of interrupted sleep, it can be a challenge to just keep your own head above the water. And even now, there’s colds and projectile vomiting and teething and…interrupted sleep.

Yet surely the payoff for all of that is the moments like these, knowing it’s you who’s responsible for getting them here, and that it’s your little person taking baby steps across the pier, and big steps into the future. It was a pretty perfect moment.