What a Tiny Baby Lemur Taught Me About Motherhood and Survival

Don't, under any circumstances, let your highly impressionable four-year-old watch a nature documentary about the rainforest forty-five minutes before lights out, unless you want to spend the next two weeks of your life explaining why a baby lemur can't sleep in his toddler bed. I learned this the hard way last month. I thought I was being a good mom, you know? Cultivating an appreciation for wildlife, expanding his little horizons beyond animated garbage trucks, and maybe buying myself twenty minutes to fold laundry in peace. Instead, I accidentally ignited a burning, obsessive desire for an exotic pet that lives off the coast of Africa.

My oldest is a walking cautionary tale for why you shouldn't negotiate with tiny terrorists. Once he gets an idea in his head, it takes root like a weed in a Texas garden. So, there I was at midnight, bleary-eyed and scrolling through wildlife databases on my phone, desperately searching for facts I could use to talk him out of asking Santa for an endangered primate. And I'm just gonna be real with you, the more I read about how these wild mothers operate, the more I realized they've this whole parenting gig figured out way better than we do.

The three ounce newborn reality check

My doctor always told me my babies were on the smaller side of the growth charts, which stressed me out to no end, but apparently a newborn ring-tailed lemur weighs an estimated three ounces. Three ounces! That's basically a stick of butter with bright blue eyes. I can't even fathom keeping something that fragile alive, considering I was terrified to hold my own eight-pound newborns without a boppy pillow and adult supervision.

According to whatever late-night rabbit hole I fell down, these tiny infants just cling directly to their mother's chest for the first two weeks of life. Just grab on to her fur and hold tight while she leaps through the trees. It sounds somewhat majestic until you remember what it actually feels like to have a creature physically attached to your body for fourteen days straight. I practically lived with my youngest strapped to my chest in her Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie because she refused to nap anywhere else for the first three months of her life. I really do love those onesies because the organic cotton is incredibly soft and never gives her those weird red rash marks that cheap synthetic fabrics do, though honestly I wish I had bought a few more of the darker colors because the natural undyed ones show absolutely every single spit-up stain imaginable.

But back to the lemurs. The mothers just carry them around like little furry front-packs. I guess when your baby only weighs three ounces, you don't have to worry about destroying your lower back or needing a chiropractic adjustment every time you do the dishes.

Raising kids takes a literal village

You hear people talk about "the village" all the time, and it drives me absolutely insane. Instagram makes the village look like a group of beautifully dressed aesthetic moms drinking overpriced lattes while their children quietly play with wooden blocks in the background. My mom always tells me that many hands make light work, which is a lovely sentiment, bless her heart, but she also lives forty minutes away and has a bad knee. My actual village consists mostly of my husband when he gets off work, the Amazon delivery guy who knows not to ring the doorbell during nap time, and the teenagers at the grocery store pickup window.

But lemur society? They have a real, functioning village. From what I understand, the entire troop steps up to raise the babies. Other community members actually help care for the young, and some researchers claim the mothers will even casually exchange babies with each other. Can you imagine? Just handing your crying infant to your neighbor and taking theirs for a while because you need a change of scenery. I'd pay good money for that kind of setup on a Tuesday afternoon when all three of mine are melting down simultaneously.

Some critically endangered species, like the red-ruffed ones, apparently build actual nests for litters of up to six infants where the mom just hides out and nests for two weeks straight while the rest of the family brings her food. Meanwhile, the ring-tailed ones just let the babies ride piggyback like little hitchhikers.

Who runs the world hint it's the moms

This is the part of my research that I found genuinely fascinating. Lemur troops are matriarchal, which means the females exhibit social dominance over the males. The moms lead the group, they dictate where everyone is going that day, and most importantly, they get to eat first. I tried explaining this concept of female social dominance to my husband while he was eating the last of the good tortilla chips in our pantry, and let's just say it didn't really land the way I hoped it would.

But jokes aside, it's a rare trait in the animal kingdom, and it made me kind of sad to learn that up to 90% of all these species might be facing extinction right now. The scientists seem to think it's mostly due to massive deforestation over in Madagascar. The Houston Zoo apparently put out a statement advising people to avoid buying illegally logged Malagasy woods like rosewood and ebony because it completely destroys the habitats these matriarchs rely on to raise their troops.

I don't know who's casually buying imported ebony furniture on a regular basis, but learning about how our shopping habits wreck a habitat half a world away definitely made me look around my own chaotic house. Instead of buying cheap plastic junk that breaks in a week and ends up in a landfill, throwing away your money on things you don't need, and ignoring where materials come from, you might as well just look for sustainably sourced stuff so we aren't completely ruining the planet for our grandkids. If you're trying to make better choices for your own little troop, take a minute to browse through our collection of sustainably sourced wooden toys that won't cost the earth.

Why a wild primate is a terrible houseguest

Eventually, I had to sit my four-year-old down and break his little heart. I couldn't just tell him "no" because he demands a bibliography for every rule I enforce in this house. So I hit him with the cold, hard facts I found from some wildlife vet at a place called Clermont Animal Hospital.

First of all, I told him, you can't housebreak them. That means if we got one, it would have to wear diapers. For its entire twenty-year lifespan. Twenty years of diapers. My son, who just finally mastered the potty himself and is very proud of his big boy underwear, looked absolutely disgusted at the prospect of changing monkey diapers until he was twenty-four years old.

Second, I told him they apparently get super aggressive when they hit puberty. Basically, they turn into wild, biting teenagers with fangs, which frankly sounds exactly like what my middle child is going to be like in about ten years, but we don't need two of them in the house. The vet experts strongly advise against keeping them as pets because they belong in the wild, swinging from trees, not trapped in a suburban living room in Texas.

We had to reach a compromise. I told him we couldn't have an exotic pet swinging from our ceiling fans, but we could set up something fun for his baby sister to swing from. We got the Wooden Baby Gym | Rainbow Play Gym Set with Animal Toys, and it actually ended up being one of my favorite nursery purchases. The natural wood looks decent in my living room, the little hanging elephant is precious, and it uses sustainably sourced materials, so I don't have to feel guilty about deforestation. Of course, my oldest definitely tried to climb it himself on the second day we had it and I had to threaten to throw it in the trash, but the baby absolutely loves swatting at the geometric shapes.

Chewing on everything in sight

Another wild fact I learned is that these critters grow up incredibly fast. They're actively moving around by three days old and eating solid food by six weeks. Six weeks! At six weeks old, my babies were still basically angry little potatoes who didn't even know they had hands.

But when my kids finally did start teething, they channeled their inner wild animals and tried to gnaw on the edges of my coffee table. Teething is just a miserable season of motherhood. You're exhausted, the baby is miserable, and everything is covered in an ungodly amount of drool.

I ended up buying the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy because I liked that it was food-grade silicone and BPA-free. Honestly, it's just okay. It's really cute, and the material is definitely safe, but my middle child kept dropping it in the dirt outside, and those little textured nooks that are supposed to massage the gums are kind of annoying to scrub clean honestly. She did seem to really love chewing on the panda's ears when her molars were coming in, so it got the job done, but I wouldn't call it a miracle product.

Mother nature is flying by the seat of her pants

honestly, I think mother nature is just making it up as she goes along, much like the rest of us. Whether you're a tired mom in rural Texas trying to keep three toddlers from coloring on the walls, or a blue-eyed matriarch in the rainforest carrying a three-ounce infant on your chest, we're all just doing our best to keep our little troops alive.

Teaching our kids to respect wildlife from a distance instead of trying to own it's probably one of the most important lessons we can pass down. If we want them to grow up in a world where these incredible animals still exist, we've to start paying attention to the choices we make today, from the toys we buy to the clothes we put on their backs. Ready to upgrade your nursery with items that are safe for your baby and gentle on the planet? Explore our full collection of sustainable baby essentials right here at Kianao.

Messy questions about motherhood and wildlife

Why do babies cling to you constantly?

Because they literally don't know they're a separate person from you yet. My doctor told me that in the fourth trimester, babies are just operating on pure instinct, much like those little primates clinging to their moms. I spent the first four months of my middle child's life functioning as a human mattress. It's exhausting, your back will ache, and you'll forget what it feels like to sleep on your stomach, but I promise they eventually decide to explore the floor.

How small are newborn lemurs compared to human preemies?

Not even close. A three-ounce lemur is so tiny it's hard to even picture. Even the smallest human preemies usually weigh at least a pound or two and require massive medical intervention to survive. The fact that a wild animal that small just grabs onto some fur and hopes for the best while its mother leaps through trees is absolutely wild to me.

Are wooden baby toys really better for the environment?

It really depends on where the wood comes from, which is why I got so paranoid reading about the illegal logging in Madagascar. If you're buying cheap, mass-produced wooden toys from shady online marketplaces, probably not. But if you look for sustainably sourced, responsibly harvested wood like the stuff Kianao uses, it's a million times better than buying plastic junk that will sit in a landfill for five hundred years after your kid loses interest in it.

How long do you really need to boil silicone teethers?

The box always says to sanitize them constantly, but I'm going to be honest with y'all—after the first child, my standards plummeted. I boiled my oldest kid's teethers once a week. By the time my third came around, if she dropped her teether on the floor of the minivan, I just wiped it on my jeans and handed it back. Food-grade silicone is pretty resilient, so tossing it in the dishwasher on the top rack is usually plenty to keep the germs at bay.

Can you ever seriously potty train a monkey or lemur?

No, you really can't. They don't have the neurological setup to understand bathroom rules like dogs or cats do. That vet clinic article I found made it super clear—if you keep a primate in your house, you're committing to changing its diapers for decades. Considering how much I loathe potty training human toddlers, that fact alone was enough to permanently cure my son's desire for an exotic pet.