That Time a Baby Fox Invaded Our Garden (And Teething Saved Us)

It was 6:13 AM on a Tuesday, and I was standing in the kitchen wearing one sock, watching my daughter aggressively gnaw on the corner of our faux-mid-century sideboard like a starved termite. I glanced out the glass doors hoping for some sort of divine intervention, or at least the postman, and instead locked eyes with a literal wild animal sitting next to our overturned recycling bin.

You hear about urban wildlife all the time in London, but actual baby foxes are usually something you only see in viral videos or printed on expensive nursery wallpaper. Yet here one was, staring at my bedhead with total indifference. For a split second, my sleep-deprived brain thought, Ah, a woodland creature has come to bless my home. I shall give it half a digestive biscuit.

Don't do this. It turns out that treating the local wildlife like you’re an extra in a Disney movie is a catastrophic idea, but we'll get to my frantic internet research shortly.

The wild animal in the garden

I stood there for entirely too long marveling at its russet coat, completely ignoring the fact that my other twin was currently trying to eat a dropped piece of dry penne pasta off the rug. I ended up spending three hours reading about fox biology instead of washing the mountain of heavily soiled nappies waiting for me in the bathroom.

Did you know they're born completely blind and deaf, weighing about the same as a small apple? At around four weeks old, their eyes miraculously change from a slate blue to a piercing, magical amber color. It's profoundly unfair, honestly. Human babies just get muddy, indeterminate grey eyes that eventually settle into whatever genetic beige they inherited, while this creature out by my rubbish bin gets to undergo a mystical color-changing transformation before it’s even stopped drinking milk. The wildlife sites say they wean at about six weeks and just sort of wander off to learn how to hunt, which frankly sounds like a dream compared to the agonizing transition from purees to solid food that currently has my kitchen ceiling coated in mashed peas.

When you're staring at one through double-glazed glass, your exhausted mind starts asking entirely useless questions. For instance, what's a baby fox called, exactly? My frantic, one-handed phone typing revealed they're officially called kits, though pups and cubs are also acceptable if you aren't a pedant. I couldn’t settle on a proper baby fox name either, briefly considering 'Sir Digby' before remembering that naming wild animals is the very first step toward accidentally adopting a vector for disease.

When to step in and when to hide behind the glass

My GP had vaguely warned me about foxes once during a checkup after I asked a highly paranoid question about the twins playing in the dirt at our local park. He mumbled something about Echinococcus multilocularis—which sounds like a spell from Harry Potter but is actually a deeply unpleasant tapeworm—and reminded me that while rare, these animals are absolutely not golden retrievers.

The internet strongly suggested observing them from a safe distance, noting that if you see a kit playing alone in your garden during the day, it's almost certainly not abandoned. The mother is usually hiding in the bushes nearby, judging your patchy lawn maintenance. The urge to crack the door and slide out a piece of buttered toast was overwhelming, but teaching a wild predator to associate the back door of a terraced house with snack time is basically a death sentence for the animal, not to mention a terrible idea for a father whose children currently lick the pavement for fun.

So, rather than opening the door to offer a tribute of baked goods and accidentally plunging my family into a wildlife crisis, I just kept the glass shut, took a blurry photo for the family group chat, and let the kit dig up my prized hostas in peace.

The indoor predators and their silicone prey

The real predators were inside anyway. The sideboard-chewing had escalated significantly by 7 AM. Every baby goes through this feral biting phase, but both twins were in the thick of teething at the exact same time, a developmental milestone that I'm convinced is a biological cruel joke designed to entirely break parental spirits.

Page 47 of the parenting book we bought suggests you remain calm and project a soothing energy when they're distressed, which I found deeply unhelpful at 3 AM while attempting to syringe strawberry-flavored Calpol into a thrashing mouth. The sheer volume of drool was astounding; it's a highly corrosive substance that soaked through three layers of clothing in twenty minutes flat.

This is exactly when the baby fox teether entered our lives and promptly saved my remaining sanity. I'm talking about the Fox Silicone Baby Teether. I don't usually preach about specific toys because babies are notoriously fickle and will usually prefer a wooden spoon anyway, but this thing was an absolute workhorse. Twin A took to it with a ferocity that was slightly terrifying.

It’s made of one solid piece of silicone, which meant I didn’t have to worry about mold secretly growing inside some hidden squeaker hole (a horror story my sister-in-law shared that kept me awake for three consecutive nights). The textured ears on this little silicone fox reached the exact back corner of her gums where a molar was threatening to erupt, saving me from having my own index finger severed during a desperate attempt to apply numbing gel. I could just lob it into the dishwasher at night next to the coffee mugs, and it would emerge sterile and ready for another day of violent gnawing.

An honest verdict on crochet in a messy house

Because I'm a helpless victim of aesthetically pleasing internet ads, I also bought the Fox Rattle Tooth Ring. It's undeniably gorgeous. The combination of smooth beechwood and that incredibly detailed crochet fox head made me feel like a very earthy, sophisticated parent who only buys artisanal goods and probably bakes sourdough.

But here's the cold, hard truth about crochet when you've twin toddlers: it attracts grime like a magnet. Twin B dropped it in a puddle of mysterious origin outside the Tesco Metro, and trying to spot-clean premium cotton yarn at four in the afternoon while holding two screaming toddlers is an exercise in utter futility. It’s lovely for supervised, stationary indoor play on a clean rug, but I wouldn't dare take it out of the house again. If you've a child who politely mouths their toys, it's brilliant. If you've a child who buries their belongings in the garden, stick to the silicone.

If you're looking for more ways to distract yourself from the chaos of early parenthood, browsing through Kianao's organic baby clothes is a highly good coping mechanism when you're trapped under a sleeping infant.

Hiding under the woodland theme

To round out the unintentional woodland theme that was taking over my living room, we spent a lot of time huddled under the Woodland Fox Organic Cotton Baby Blanket. When the medicine hadn't kicked in yet and everyone was crying (myself included), I'd wrap us up in this inexplicably soft fabric.

I don't really understand how organic cotton works—something about no pesticides and ethical farming that my wife explained to me twice while I was staring blankly at the wall—but I do know it was the only blanket that didn't make my chronically overheated twin break out in a sweat rash. We'd sit on the floor, surrounded by discarded toys and soggy bibs, hiding under a blanket covered in tiny orange foxes, watching the real one finally trot away through the fence panels.

If you're currently trapped in the teething trenches and need something to absorb the drool or save your furniture from tiny teeth, explore the full range of sanity-saving gear in the Kianao baby teethers collection before your child eats your skirting boards.

Questions I frantically googled at 4 AM

What should you do if you find a fox kit in the garden?

Resist the urge to turn your life into a cartoon. I immediately wanted to adopt it and name it, but honestly, unless it's clearly injured or surrounded by flies (which is a deeply grim thing the wildlife rescue site told me to look for), just leave it alone. The mother is almost certainly watching from the bushes judging your landscaping choices.

Are foxes dangerous to toddlers?

My health visitor seemed much more concerned about the diseases they carry in their poo than the actual animals attacking us. They carry some horrific-sounding parasites like mange and tapeworms, so I just have to be extra vigilant that the twins don't eat the dirt in the flowerbeds, which is a constant, losing battle anyway.

When do babies actually start teething?

The pristine medical books say somewhere around six months, but my twins started turning into drool-faucets at four months. It felt like they spent an entire year just growing teeth one agonizing millimeter at a time, so don't panic if your kid starts chewing their fists early.

How do you clean silicone teethers without losing your mind?

I literally just throw ours in the top rack of the dishwasher. When you're running on two hours of broken sleep, anything that can't survive a high-heat wash cycle is dead to me. No boiling water, no special brushes, just chuck it in with the plates.

Can I put teethers in the freezer to make them colder?

Our pediatrician muttered something about frozen solid things potentially damaging their delicate gums, so we just kept the silicone ones in the fridge. A nice chill seemed to stop the screaming without turning the toy into a literal ice block that could chip a brand-new tooth.