The absolute madness of tracking baby milestones in year one

I'm staring at a colour-coded spreadsheet at 2:14 in the morning while one of my daughters attempts to eat a rogue piece of lint she found in the folds of my pyjama top. The spreadsheet is titled 'Infant Progress Tracker' (because I used to be a journalist and I love a good column), and I'm frantically trying to determine if grasping a fistful of my chest hair counts as a fine motor skill. I had fallen into the dark, sticky trap of logging every twitch and burp, comparing my identical twins against each other as if they were competing in some sort of high-stakes baby Olympics. Please, if you take nothing else from my sleep-deprived ramblings, delete the apps that tell you what your child should be doing on a Tuesday in their seventeenth week of life.

The turning point for me came during a routine check-up with our GP, Dr. Davies, a woman who always looked like she needed a nap significantly more than my children did. I handed her my phone, completely unprompted, to show her a graph I had made detailing how Maya was attempting to roll over, whilst Isla lay there like a contented, slightly chubby starfish. Dr. Davies pushed my phone away with the back of her pen and told me that babies are stubbornly illiterate and haven't read the textbooks I was consulting. She suggested I throw the spreadsheet into the digital bin and just pay attention to the actual babies in front of me.

The internet will break your spirit

My phone's autocomplete just filled in baby m with a terrifying array of diagnostic criteria before I had even finished my morning coffee. When you're operating on three hours of broken sleep and sustained entirely by cold toast, the internet is not your friend. I used to sit in the nursery while they slept, furiously searching for baby milestones by month, absolutely convinced that because Isla hadn't clapped her hands by week twenty-two, she was destined to be socially inept forever.

The reality of a baby's timeline is that it resembles a Jackson Pollock painting rather than a linear graph. I strongly advise against looking up baby milestones by week unless you want to induce a mild panic attack, because some overly enthusiastic parent on a forum will always claim their three-week-old is reciting Shakespeare. You end up staring at your own child, who's currently cross-eyed and drooling onto their own chin, wondering where you went wrong. You didn't go wrong, you just have a normal infant who's currently dedicating all their neural energy to figuring out how their bowels work.

The absolute myth of the potato phase

I spent days agonizing over 3 month baby milestones because the health visitor handed me a pamphlet that mentioned things like 'social smiling' and 'head control'. The first time Maya smiled at me, I felt a big sense of paternal bonding right up until she let out a burp that shook the windows and returned to her default expression of mild disdain. I'm fairly certain the doctors just make up these early markers to give us something to look for so we don't go mad from the boredom of staring at a creature that does nothing but leak fluids.

Our only real goal during this phase was surviving tummy time, which the twins treated as a form of medieval torture. You just sort of dump them on the floor, watch them smash their faces into the rug, and hope they figure out gravity without crying too much. We eventually bought the Organic Cotton Baby Blanket in Pear Print, which turned out to be the one purchase I didn't regret at 3am. It's genuinely brilliant, mostly because the cotton is ridiculously soft on their faces when they inevitably give up and face-plant, and the yellow pears give them something high-contrast to stare at while they grunt with exertion. It also washed brilliantly, which was vital because tummy time usually resulted in a spectacular amount of spit-up that I frankly didn't know a tiny stomach could hold.

If you're currently trapped under a sleeping infant and doing some panic-shopping, you can browse Kianao’s full range of organic baby blankets while you wait for the feeling to return to your arm.

The obsession with the solitary Cheerio

I need to talk about the pincer grasp.

At some point around the nine-month mark, every medical professional, parenting book, and nosy relative becomes hyper-fixated on whether your child can pick up a small object using only their thumb and index finger. I don't understand why this specific party trick is the gold standard of human development. I spent hours—literal hours—scattering organic puffed cereal across the highchair tray, watching Isla mash them into a fine dust with her palm like an angry tiny baker kneading dough. Maya, on the other hand, figured it out early but only used her newfound precision to extract tiny bits of dirt from the carpet and place them directly onto her tongue.

You find yourself cheering for a successful Cheerio retrieval with the kind of primal roar usually reserved for a football final. The tension in the kitchen would be palpable as Isla's chubby little hand hovered over a blueberry, her fingers splayed out in a star shape, while I silently willed her to just pinch the bloody thing. When she finally did it, I nearly cried, only for her to instantly shove the blueberry into her left ear.

Eventually they'll stand up using the sofa and immediately fall back down, which is fine.

Buying things to fix the anxiety

When you're desperate for them to hit a specific marker, you start buying things to force the issue. The internet told me they needed multi-textured surfaces for oral development, so I bought the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Chew Toy. I'll be perfectly honest with you here: it's fine. It's a piece of food-grade silicone shaped like a panda. It did a decent job of stopping Maya from gnawing on my collarbone, and you can chuck it in the fridge which apparently numbs the gums (though I suspect it just shocks them into silence for thirty seconds). But sometimes they just preferred a damp, cold muslin cloth from the kitchen sink. The main benefit of the panda was that it was bright enough to easily locate in the absolute disaster zone that was my changing bag.

What actually helped their development—or at least gave me twenty minutes to drink a cup of tea without someone screaming—was the Wooden Baby Gym with Unicorn Toys. Before they could crawl and actively seek out danger, I'd slide them under this wooden A-frame. I think the NHS pamphlet said something about hand-eye coordination and visual tracking, but my entirely unscientific observation was that they just really liked batting at the crocheted unicorn until they tired themselves out. It looks quite nice in the living room too, which is a rare victory when your home has otherwise been overrun by garish plastic junk that plays the same off-key electronic tune until you remove the batteries and pretend it's broken.

When the doctor actually raises an eyebrow

All of my frantic charting was completely pointless, but there was one time we actually had to go to the clinic for something that wasn't just my own neurosis. Maya had a phase where she absolutely refused to bear any weight on her legs when we held her up. She would just tuck her knees to her chest like a cannonball. I remember our doctor doing that specific slow nod that doctors do when they're trying not to alarm you, muttering something about gross motor delays and muscle tone.

The advice we got wasn't a clean, clinical fact. It was a messy, uncertain recommendation to just keep trying, maybe do some specific stretches, and wait a month to see if she figured it out. We were told to look for regression—if she stopped doing things she used to do—rather than panicking that she wasn't doing the new things fast enough. It turns out she just hated the feeling of the textured rug in the nursery on her bare feet, because the moment we put socks on her, she stood up like a champion. Science is mostly just guesswork and knitwear, it seems.

If you're tired of stressing over spreadsheets and just want something to keep them happily distracted on the floor, grab our Lama Wooden Baby Gym and give yourself a well-deserved break.

Questions I asked the internet at 3am

Do I really need to track development week by week?

No, please don't do this to yourself. Your baby is completely unaware of what week it's. They don't care that the app says they should be babbling consonants today. If you track it by the week, you'll spend your entire life feeling like your child is behind schedule. Zoom out and look at the whole month, or better yet, just look at the baby and see if they seem generally happy and engaged with the world.

My baby isn't rolling over yet, should I panic?

One of my twins rolled at four months and the other waited until six months because she simply had no desire to see what the other side of the room looked like. Our GP told us that some heavier babies just take longer to figure out the physics of moving their own mass. As long as they're getting plenty of floor time and not strapped into a bouncy chair all day, they'll roll when they realise there's a toy out of reach that they desperately want to put in their mouth.

Are baby walkers seriously banned or is that an urban myth?

The sit-in ones with wheels are heavily discouraged by pediatricians everywhere and outright banned in some countries because babies use them to launch themselves down staircases at terminal velocity. Also, they apparently teach them to walk on their tiptoes which messes up their hips. Just put them on the floor. The floor is safe, boring, and free.

How do I know if they're teething or just angry?

You never really know until a tooth magically appears through the gumline. Everything is a sign of teething: drooling, bad sleep, not eating, chewing their fist, screaming at the cat. But these are also signs of a baby just being a baby. Give them a cold silicone toy, dose them with a bit of infant paracetamol if they seem in genuine pain, and ride out the storm.

When does the sleep regression end?

I'll let you know when it happens, mate. My twins are two and we still occasionally have nights where someone wakes up at 4am demanding a banana and a chat about dogs. Every time they learn a new skill—like crawling or standing—their brain gets so excited it forgets how to sleep. You just have to lower your expectations of rest to absolute zero and treat any continuous sleep as a delightful surprise.