How to boil a baby - and get them to sleep in a tent.
I’m not sure there’s anyone reading this who can say that 2020 has gone to plan. Certainly not in our case. One of us has lost their employment whilst the other works from home; the three school age children (including the one who’d only just started boarding school last September) have all been at home, the house is showing the effects of having been fully occupied by all six of us almost continually since we got back from California in January and we’ve not seen most of our family for months - in some cases not because we can’t, but because, sadly, we mustn't.
Our cars have scarcely turned a wheel, to the point where we’ve been out to run them on a couple of occasions, just to keep the batteries conditioned. On the other hand, new bikes have come into the fleet, from the sub-£20 Lena ‘Toddlebike’ via the (rather more expensive) HUP evo Thomas Ivor built in his bedroom to the <cough! final paycheck-absorbing!> Onderwater Tandem XL, which came into our lives unexpectedly and arrived in the back of a lorry from London, and we have settled into new living patterns which involve less travel overall, but more cycling. During the most critical phase of the lockdown (the first one, if this post is overtaken by events) cycling was all we left the house to do, and we are now resolved that those groceries we buy locally rather than having delivered by the supermarket, we collect under our own steam.
Lots of change, then - and alongside our own behaviours we have tried to encourage others to ‘build back better’ in a town where the car is king. We’ve been involved in advocacy for the Government’s Emergency Active Travel Fund, working with other campaigners locally and nationally, to try to ensure that the money which has rapidly been put on the table to help others to walk and cycle in our changed circumstances, is used, and used well. More on that in another post.
As positive as some of the enforced change has been, there have also been things we’ve missed. Chief amongst these has been the way baby Robert has seen less of the world than he might. At the beginning of the lockdown he was a babe-in-arms. He’s stood, cruised, walked and even got on the aforementioned toddlebike for the first time during the last few months, whilst leaving home as a trailer passenger behind my bike, but seldom for much else. Pieces of outdoor gear we’d held onto since Rhoda’s infancy, for him to use, have lain untouched, as have more recent investments - and some of them may never see service with us, again. He’s growing fast!
One significant thing, for us anyway as Family ByCycle, was that we realised Robert hadn’t spent a night under canvas since the World Road Championships back in September. With the faintest prospect on the horizon of riding somewhere for an overnight stay, before the summer is over (and we’re still not sure what that looks like, if it happens at all) it dawned on us that we might have been storing up trouble on the overnight front.
People often ask us for tips to persuade children, often pre-schoolers and older, to start to participate in outdoor activities. That’s a conundrum, because our well-worn technique for outdoorsmanship with children, and the same for learning to ride, is simply that if you do it from the word go, and all do it together, they’ll never know any different. In fact, that’s a large part of our parenting philosophy, to the extent that we have one. We eat our meals at the table together, including babies. We all ride our bikes, often together. We present ourselves as a family, and be it at public speaking events, church, whatever, and in proportion to age and understanding, we all take part. Sometimes we sleep in a tent, or a bivvy bag, and that’s just what our family does. Ruth and Rhoda never batted an eyelid about it. Growth in their participation in these activities is iterative, building bricks upon bricks, but the fact of participating at all was established before they had chance to contemplate the alternative. It follows the old tale about boiling a frog. Not that we actually do it, you understand, but the story (now discredited; I don’t want to know how!) that if you throw a frog into boiling water, it will jump out in response - like trying to bath a baby. On the other hand, put the frog in water it’s happy in, and then slowly raise the temperature, and it’ll stay there until the situation is irrevocable. Usually this story is used to illustrate a weakened response to change, or risk, in a negative sense, but for parents, where the objective is to get your child to do something reasonable without kicking off, we find it a useful strategy.
Time to start raising the temperature of the water, then, so we could ‘boil’ our baby - and the night before last, much to Ruth and Rhoda’s delight, we pitched our touring tent (which, thank heavens, hadn’t suffered whilst in storage) in the garden for a ‘dummy run’.
Thomas Ivor camping with Daddy, October 2009.
The back garden of an urban residence, especially your own, where you have neighbours to stay friends with for the longer-term, is a high-stakes place to take your baby camping for the first time they will remember. In fact, my distinct preference for such a trip is to be as far from the sight and sound of others as possible - in the wilds of Scotland worked nicely for the girls, and in Thomas Ivor’s case, it was a soggy field in mid-Wales. Campsites are less conducive to the objective, because on the one hand you want noisy neighbours so you’re not the people everyone’s glaring at in the morning, yet on the other, you want the little one to actually sleep. Horrible memories of trying to soothe/hypnotise to sleep, a teething baby, using a ‘phone and recordings of Bach’s ‘Well Tempered Klavier’, on a posh campsite in Devon whilst you could hear the chorus of disapprobation from the next outfit, which was categorically not helping.
Robert wasn’t sure about the tent at first, and indeed one of his initial discoveries was that he could crawl out of it, straight under the door, without it being unzipped. Drat.
Nevertheless, there are some incentives which a 15-month-old cannot resist - and an iPhone with Postman Pat on it (1981’s Series 1, natch - none of your ‘Special Delivery Service’ cobblers) is definitely one of those things. Before he knew it, I’d got Robert into the inner tent whilst I blew up some sleeping mats and unpacked bedding. The water was warming up.
After our experience with Rhoda, who had an unerring knack of crawling onto other people (including their faces) during a night in the tent, Robert has been treated to a new piece of kit, the Deryan Baby Luxe pop-up cot-cum-tent, which we bought last summer and had used pathetically little until now. There’s ample space inside what is essentially a pop-up tent for an infant to sleep in, but not quite enough height for the little guy to sit upright when the door’s zipped up. First attempt, zipping him in to play in it, and he immediately turned it into an ‘atlasphere’ and started trying to roll it around the tent, in the hope he would somehow escape. Out he came again!
The water evidently needed warming more slowly; having royally upset Robert by putting him in his sleeping bag (we use the design with the arm holes, same as we would in the house, for camping in the summer, so the child can’t escape) I sat him back in the cot, lid open, and handed him some milk, which caused him totally to forget that the world was ending. Bonanza. Bubbles and a bit of steam.
A further screening of Postman Pat later, shown through the mesh of the side of the cot, and he was curling up to go to sleep, as the tent fell dark. Last night, second time round, he actually climbed into the cot himself, and even let me zip it up before he was asleep. He’s still there as I’m writing this now, sound asleep, probably more comfortable than I was, given my relative size, weight, the slope of the garden, and the fact that I discovered the ferrule for the rotary washing line was poking me in the bum, in the early hours.
Two nights of warming up the water and it seems that Robert is almost cooked. Time to plan some adventures for him, to keep him hot!