What I Wish I Knew About Raising Your Very Own Human Baby Sloth

Dear Tom of exactly six months ago,

You're currently hiding in the downstairs loo while the kettle boils, pressing your forehead against the cold tiles. It's 3:14 am. Twin A has refused to be put down since Tuesday, and Twin B is currently upstairs gnawing violently on the rails of her cot. You're frantically scrolling through a toddler independence blog, wondering where you went wrong and why they won't just self-soothe like the smug books promised.

I need you to close that tab immediately. Chuck those manuals into the recycling bin (the blue one, mate, the foxes got into the green one again). You're approaching this entirely wrong. You're operating under the delusion that you're raising human infants who will eventually conform to a schedule. You aren't. You have somehow spawned two baby sloths.

I say this because I eventually stumbled onto a wildlife conservation website in my sleep-deprived delirium, and the biological parallels are frankly staggering. Once you accept that you're living with two wild rainforest mammals who view your chest as a permanent tree branch, your blood pressure will significantly improve.

The biological necessity of being a human tree

Right now, you're stressed because every time you try to unpeel Twin A from your collarbone and place her on a flat surface, she screams as if you've dangled her over a volcano. Our health visitor, a lovely woman whose own children are safely in their thirties, suggested we just enforce some boundaries. I tried that. It resulted in a noise that had the neighbors considering a call to the local authorities.

Here's what I wish I could tell you: I read on some blurry PDF from a wildlife institute that infant sloths have a physiological necessity to cling to their mothers from the exact moment of birth. Their muscle structure essentially demands it. If they're separated, they experience catastrophic stress. Our GP, Dr. Evans, muttered something similar during our 18-month check-up, gesturing vaguely to our girls and mentioning that primate biology hasn't really caught up with modern cots. You need to accept your new reality as a heated mattress, bin the rigid sleep schedules, and just strap them to your chest until they leave for university.

When you try to pry her off, she raises her little arms up in the air. You think she's asking for a hug. She isn't. In the sloth world, raising your arms is a defensive stress posture meant to make you look bigger to predators. When she does that, she's essentially telling you she feels like she's being abandoned to a jaguar. Just put the carrier back on. Your lower back will hate you, but your sanity will thank you.

Temperature control and other impossible tasks

You're currently spending a small fortune on room thermometers that change color when the nursery gets too warm. You obsess over Tog ratings. Stop it.

Apparently, sloths are poikilotherms (a word I'm almost certainly mispronouncing), meaning they're essentially cold-blooded and can't control their own body temperature. They rely entirely on the body heat of whatever poor creature they're clinging to. I'm convinced human babies operate on the exact same flawed software.

If you leave them alone, they freeze. If you bundle them up in polyester, they overheat and break out in an angry red rash that sends you spiraling into a WebMD panic at midnight. The only thing that actually worked for us was dressing them in the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit. It’s sleeveless, which is brilliant because it provides a breathable base layer that traps just enough of your shared body heat when they’re super-glued to your chest, without turning the two of you into a sweaty, miserable swamp. Plus, it’s organic cotton, which somehow survives the industrial-level washing we subject it to after the inevitable pureed carrot disasters.

The terrifying reality of tiny claws

Let's discuss the biting. You're currently sporting a scratch on your neck and a bite mark on your shoulder that makes you look like you lost a fight with a badger. Twin B is teething again (molars this time, I think, though checking her mouth requires the bravery of a lion tamer).

Two-fingered sloths are born with self-sharpening pseudo-canines. I'm not making this up. Even as infants, their bite can slice through flesh. Does this sound familiar? Because yesterday I watched Twin B bite straight through the plastic rim of a sippy cup.

You keep buying those aesthetic wooden teething rings that look great on Instagram. Throw them in the fireplace. They're useless when the child is in an absolute feral rage. We finally got the Panda Teether and it was the only thing that stopped her from gnawing on the coffee table. It's made of food-grade silicone, which has just enough give to satisfy that terrifying jaw strength, and you can chuck it in the fridge so it’s cold enough to numb whatever fresh hell is erupting from her gums. (We also have a few of those Gentle Baby Building Block Sets which are perfectly fine and colorful, but realistically, right now Twin A just uses them as projectiles to throw at the cat, so maybe save those for when they regain some fine motor control).

(If you're also currently realizing your child's wardrobe consists mostly of synthetic fabrics that are making the clinging sweat-fest worse, I highly think browsing Kianao's organic cotton baby clothes collection to find some breathable base layers. Your collarbones will thank you.)

Falling from the canopy

I need to warn you about the clumsiness. You're about to enter a phase where they insist on climbing onto the sofa, the television stand, and your head, only to immediately hurl themselves off into the abyss.

In the wild, baby sloths occasionally fall out of the canopy. They're built to survive massive drops onto the forest floor. Here's the horrifying part: the mothers often don't go down to retrieve them. Apparently, going down to the ground is a massive predation risk, so the mother just assumes the baby is lost and stays in the tree. Wildlife experts actually tell people to wait 12 hours before interfering with a fallen baby to see if the mum comes down.

I mentioned this to my wife as a potential childcare strategy after Twin A threw herself out of the ball pit for the fourth time in an hour. I suggested we simply remain on the sofa for 12 hours to observe her natural survival instincts. I was immediately banished to the kitchen to sterilize bottles.

Obviously, we can't ignore them when they fall (the NHS frowns upon this, as does common sense). But learning this fact did somehow make me feel better about my own parenting. I might be exhausted, covered in a mysterious sticky substance, and currently being used as a human climbing frame, but at least I retrieve my offspring when they roll off the playmat. The bar for mammalian mothering is actually quite low in the rainforest.

They don't want to be humanized

The last thing I want you to remember as you sit in that bathroom is that sloths make terrible pets because they don't "humanize" like dogs or cats. They just hide their stress. Human touch spikes their heart rate. They only want to cling, survive, and occasionally eat a leaf.

Stop trying to make your 18-month-olds act like civilized little humans. Stop expecting them to sit quietly at the café while you drink a flat white. They don't want to do puzzles. They don't want to learn French. They want to be attached to your torso, they want to steal half-chewed toast directly out of your mouth (which, coincidentally, is exactly how infant sloths get their gut bacteria—don't think about this too hard), and they want to sleep for 15 hours a day, albeit in brutal, fragmented 40-minute increments.

You're doing fine. The clinging means they feel safe. The biting means their teeth are working. The absolute refusal to exist independently of your physical body is just millions of years of primate biology working exactly as it should.

Now get up off the bathroom floor. Pour the boiling water into your mug. Strap the carrier back onto your chest, retrieve your wild little creatures, and accept your fate as a tree.

If you're ready to stop fighting the biology and just surrender to the cling, take a look at our sustainable, breathable baby wear. It won't make them sleep through the night, but it'll make being a human mattress slightly more comfortable.

Questions I still ask myself at 3am