The truth about the newborn enchanting phase

It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, or possibly a Thursday, and I was lying flat on my back on the living room rug, holding a black-and-white card depicting a heavily stylized badger. I was holding this badger approximately ten inches above the faces of my two newborn twin daughters, who were staring back at me with expressions of absolute, unvarnished hostility. The book I had naively purchased during my wife's third trimester referred to this exact zero-to-three-month window as the enchanting stage, a phrase that feels less like a developmental milestone and more like a deliberate provocation from an author who clearly had a full-time night nanny.

You're told, endlessly and by people who look entirely too rested, that these first few months are a magical time of discovery where your baby is mesmerized by the world. And sure, they're discovering things, mostly that they hate being outside the womb and possess a digestive system that operates with the violent unpredictability of a faulty boiler. The pressure to make this period academically enriching while you're simultaneously covered in varying layers of someone else's sick is staggering.

The absolute tyranny of floor practice

Our local GP—a terrifyingly brisk woman who made me feel like I was perpetually failing a GCSE science exam—informed me at our two-week check that I needed to be doing supervised tummy time every single day. She explained something about core strength and preventing their heads from flattening out like dropped melons, which naturally sent me into a spiral of anxiety where I assumed any failure to place them face-down on the floor immediately would result in them never learning to walk.

What no one mentions is that newborns despise tummy time with a passion usually reserved for tax audits.

I'd carefully lay them down, and within fourteen seconds, Baby A would begin to make a noise like a trapped seagull, while Baby B would simply face-plant into the fabric and accept her fate. You sit there, watching the second hand on your watch, essentially torturing your own offspring because a medical professional implied it was for their own good. It's an incredibly weird dynamic to enforce on someone who only learned how to breathe air a fortnight ago.

In a desperate bid to make this process less traumatic for everyone involved, I bought the Kianao organic cotton tummy time mat, largely because it was the only one that didn't look like an explosion in a primary-coloured plastic factory. It's incredibly soft, which is lovely, but its true value became apparent during week three when Baby A executed a bodily fluid incident so catastrophic it defied the laws of basic physics. The mat absorbed the brunt of it, sparing the beige carpet of our rented London flat, and I managed to chuck it in the washing machine on a cold cycle while praying the spin cycle would finish before the next meltdown began. It survived, my dignity barely did, and the carpet deposit was refunded two years later.

Through trial and significant error, I developed my own deeply unscientific rules for surviving floor practice:

Don't attempt it immediately after feeding them, unless you actively enjoy laundering your own jumpers.
If they cry for more than two minutes, pick them up, because staring at a screaming infant while whispering that it's building their shoulder muscles makes you feel like a sociopath.
Rolling up a towel under their armpits does actually help, though it makes them look like very angry little executives leaning over a boardroom table.
Sometimes you just have to lie on the floor face-to-face with them and accept that this is your life now.

The great visual cortex scam

You're supposed to show them high-contrast black and white shapes to stimulate their visual development, which I enthusiastically did for about three minutes before deciding they vastly preferred staring blankly at the ugly ceiling light fitting in the hallway anyway.

Narrating the mundane to a hostile audience

One of the more absurd things the health visitor told me was that I needed to talk to them constantly to build their oral language skills and neural pathways. This sounds lovely in theory, conjuring images of reciting Keats in a sunlit nursery. In practice, it meant I spent my days narrating the mind-numbing minutiae of domestic survival to two highly skeptical potatoes.

When you haven't spoken to another adult in twelve hours, talking to a baby feels a bit like broadcasting a radio show into the void. You catch yourself standing in the kitchen at midday, exhausted, explaining the concept of the municipal recycling schedule to an audience that's actively asleep.

"We're putting the dirty nappy in the bin now so the house doesn't smell like a swamp."
"Daddy is making instant coffee because we're out of beans and also out of the will to live."
"Look at the window, it's raining again, because we live in England and joy is fleeting."

I read somewhere that the sheer volume of words a baby hears is what matters, not necessarily the content, which I found immensely comforting. I distinctly remember reading an entire chapter of a biography on Winston Churchill aloud while trying to rock Baby B to sleep, mostly because my brain was too tired to formulate original sentences and it was the closest book I could grab with my foot. I like to think it gave her a solid grounding in twentieth-century geopolitical strategy, though she mostly just drooled on my collar.

Toys they can't hold and other financial mistakes

The baby industry relies heavily on sleep-deprived people buying things in the middle of the night under the delusion that a specific object will magically fix their current crisis. During the enchanting phase, babies can't actually do anything. They don't have the motor control to hold a toy. Their arms just randomly flail around like those inflatable tube men outside car dealerships.

Despite knowing this, I bought the Kianao natural wood rattle. It's undeniably a beautiful object—sustainably sourced, non-toxic finish, very aesthetically pleasing. It's also completely and utterly useless for a one-month-old. I handed it to Baby A, who lacked the grip strength to hold it and immediately dropped it directly onto her sister's forehead. It caused a localized twin war that lasted forty-five minutes. They're wonderful rattles, really, but save your money until week ten when they actually figure out they've hands attached to their bodies.

Instead, if you feel the desperate need to buy something sensory, get a soft crinkle toy. The babies won't hold it, but they're mildly fascinated by the aggressively loud rustling noise it makes when you squeeze it next to their ear, which at least buys you thirty seconds of silence while their brains try to process what just happened.

Psychological warfare and the burden of trust

During one particularly bleak afternoon, our health visitor dropped by and muttered something about some bloke named Erik Erikson and his stages of psychological development. She basically suggested that the first few months are the 'trust versus mistrust' stage, meaning if I didn't respond to their cries adequately, they would develop a deep-seated, lifelong mistrust of the universe and inevitably become supervillains.

This is a frankly terrifying amount of pressure to put on a man who had currently put his trousers on inside out. When you've twins, they almost always coordinate their screaming. You physically can't pick both of them up instantly while also making a bottle. You're forced to choose, every single time, who gets to develop trust and who gets to slowly build resentment. You end up sitting on the floor, holding one, jiggling the other with your foot, and profusely apologizing to both while sweating through your shirt.

The science on all this seems incredibly fuzzy anyway. Half the books say you must pick them up instantly to forge secure attachments, while the other half hint darkly that you're creating a rod for your own back. I suspect nobody genuinely knows anything for sure, and we're all just projecting our own neuroses onto infants who mostly just want to be warm, fed, and occasionally jiggled in a manner that helps them release trapped wind.

If you're currently in the thick of this supposed enchanting phase, wading through endless piles of newborn essentials and wondering when the magic is supposed to start, please know that it's entirely normal to feel like you're just managing logistics. The enchanting part doesn't really happen when they're fresh out of the box. It happens quietly, months later, when you're incredibly tired and one of them suddenly grabs your finger with intent, or gives you a gummy, asymmetrical smile that isn't just gas.

Until then, just survive it. Keep them alive, keep yourself relatively sane, and don't worry too much about whether you're adequately stimulating their visual cortex. They have the rest of their lives to look at things. Right now, staring at the ceiling is plenty.

If you want to read more about surviving the various absurdities of keeping tiny humans alive without losing your mind, you might find our baby development guide slightly more realistic than the average textbook.

Questions I frantically googled at 4 AM

When does the enchanting stage honestly become enchanting?

Honestly? Around month four. Before that, it's less of a magical journey and more of a hostage negotiation with a tiny, angry drunk. Once they learn to smile on purpose and hold their own heads up without wobbling like a dashboard hula girl, it gets significantly better.

How long should tummy time genuinely last before I intervene?

The books say three to five minutes, but my personal rule was 'until the crying escalates from minor annoyance to genuine panic.' Sometimes that was four minutes. Sometimes that was twelve seconds. You just try again later when everyone is slightly less unhinged.

Do I really need to buy a specific high-contrast mobile?

Absolutely not. I bought one, hung it over the cot, and they ignored it entirely. You can get the exact same developmental result by printing out a black square on a piece of A4 paper and holding it up, or frankly, just letting them look at the contrast between the door frame and the wall.

Are my babies crying because they mistrust me fundamentally as a parent?

No, they're crying because their digestive systems are brand new and processing milk is suddenly very difficult, or because they're tired, or because a tag on their vest is slightly irritating. Erikson's theories are great for university essays, but utterly useless when you're trying to figure out why an infant is screaming at a radiator.

Why are we supposed to talk to them if they literally don't understand English?

Because hearing the rhythm and cadence of a language builds the physical architecture in their brain that they'll use later to genuinely speak. Plus, if you don't talk to them, you'll sit in silence all day, which will drive you completely mad. Just narrate whatever you're doing, even if it's complaining about the price of nappies.