Stop Taking My Chips I'm Just A Baby: A Dad's Survival Guide

Dear Tom from exactly six months ago,

You're currently sitting on the hallway floor at 4 PM, wedged between a pile of unopened mail and a rogue wellington boot, trying to negotiate with a toddler who has just hurled a fistful of Wotsits at your head. You're losing your mind because she won't listen to reason, and you've been watching that TikTok video on a loop to cope—the one where the kid is fiercely defending a snack, squeaking stop taking my chips i'm just a baby. You think it’s just a hilarious i'm just a baby meme that perfectly captures the absurdity of our daily lives, but I'm writing to you from the future to remind you that it's, in fact, a big biological manifesto.

You're furious because you expect them to behave like tiny, rational adults who understand the concept of time, sharing, and not wiping hummus on the sofa. But I need you to cast your sleep-deprived mind back to the newborn trenches, because we seem to have forgotten the one piece of actual science that kept us alive back then: they're literally just babies.

I know it's hard to remember anything from those early days besides the smell of sour milk and the constant, vibrating anxiety, but do you remember the absolute shock of bringing them home? We bought books. Heavy, judgmental books written by people who clearly had live-in nannies and pristine white carpets, which suggested we implement a strict feeding and sleeping schedule from day three. I spent two weeks frantically logging every bowel movement on a smartphone app, convinced that if I just cracked the algorithmic code of their digestion, they would magically start sleeping through the night. I treated them like malfunctioning smart-home devices rather than human beings whose skulls hadn't even fully fused yet.

We bought a terrifyingly expensive smart bassinet that was supposed to gently rock them to sleep using space-age sensors, but it just made Maya seasick and furious, so it spent six months functioning as a very high-tech laundry basket.

The terrifying reality of Las Vegas time

It wasn't until our NHS health visitor came round for the two-week check (a woman who looked like she hadn't slept since the mid-nineties and therefore commanded my absolute respect) that someone finally explained why everything felt so catastrophic. I poured her a terrible cup of instant coffee and confessed that the girls seemed to think 3 AM was prime time for a rave. She casually mentioned that newborns are essentially operating on "Las Vegas time," having spent the last forty weeks in a dark, warm, incredibly loud casino where the buffet is open twenty-four hours a day.

Apparently, this entire phase is known as the fourth trimester, a concept that implies they're biologically supposed to still be in the womb but were evicted early because human heads are inconveniently large. Their little nervous systems are completely unfinished, meaning they've absolutely zero circadian rhythm and no concept of day or night, which somehow made me feel slightly better about the fact that I was hallucinating from exhaustion.

She told us that the only way to calm them down was to recreate the womb, which involves a frankly exhausting amount of shushing, swaying, and holding them tightly against your chest while pacing the living room rug until your calves cramp.

Why I spent our mortgage on organic fabric

Because they're effectively unfinished human beings, their skin is also absurdly fragile. I wish I could tell you that you don't need to overthink their clothes, but those cheap synthetic sleepsuits we bought at the supermarket on a panicked late-night run ended up giving Isla a rash that looked like a topographical map of the London Underground. Our GP muttered something about newborn skin being highly permeable and prone to eczema, which immediately sent me into a guilt spiral of throwing away half their wardrobe.

We eventually switched entirely to the Kianao Sleeveless Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuits. I’m not usually one to evangelize about fabric blends—mostly because I still shrink my own jumpers in the wash on a regular basis—but these things are ridiculously soft. More importantly, they stretch over their massive, wobbly heads without that terrifying snapping sound that makes you think you’ve just dislocated an infant's collarbone. They also have those little envelope folds at the shoulders, which I only learned (far too late into fatherhood) are designed so you can pull the entire garment *down* over their legs when they've a blowout, rather than dragging a mustard-colored catastrophe up over their face.

If you're also currently hiding in the bathroom scrolling on your phone to escape the chaos, you might want to browse Kianao's organic baby essentials, if only to save yourself from the synthetic fabric nightmares we endured.

The sheer volume of drool is medically alarming

And then, just when you think you've survived the fourth trimester and they might actually start resembling human beings, the teething starts. I'm convinced that a baby cutting their first teeth is one of nature's cruelest practical jokes.

People will buy you bizarre things to help with this. Someone sent us a silicone teether shaped like a bubble tea, complete with little textured boba pearls at the bottom. It’s fine, I suppose, and they occasionally gnawed on it, but I’m fairly certain the complex cultural nuance of a Taiwanese beverage is entirely lost on a creature who recently tried to eat a handful of carpet fluff.

But the Panda Teether was the actual holy grail. I don't know what kind of dark magic is injected into the silicone ears of this specific panda, but when Maya was cutting her incisors and turning into a nocturnal demon who communicated only in high-pitched shrieks, it was the only thing that brought the volume down. You can chuck it in the fridge (not the freezer, as my mum insisted, which apparently can cause ice burns on their gums), and the cold silicone somehow numbs the agony just enough for you to sit in silence for ten minutes.

For actual playtime during those long, bleak afternoon hours where time seems to stand still, we eventually binned the garish plastic monstrosity that played a manic, tinny version of 'Old MacDonald' and got the Rainbow Play Gym Set. It's literally just a wooden frame with some incredibly gentle, sensory hanging toys like a little elephant and some wooden rings. It didn't flash, it didn't sing, and it didn't require eight AA batteries, which meant I could actually hear my own thoughts while they lay on their backs and stared at it in big, baffling wonder.

Walking away is an actual parenting strategy

The main thing I need you to remember right now, as you sit on the floor covered in Wotsit dust, is what the pediatrician told us about the crying. Sometime around week three, the girls hit what the medical community ominously calls the "witching hour," a period between 5 PM and 11 PM where a baby will just scream at the universe for no discernible reason other than the sheer overwhelming tragedy of existing.

We tried everything. We paced, we bounced, we drove them around the M25 at two in the morning. But the most valuable thing any medical professional ever said to me was that if they're fed, dry, and safe, and you feel a dark, furious knot of panic rising in your chest because the noise is physically vibrating in your teeth, you're allowed to just put them in the cot and leave the room.

It feels entirely unnatural, and the guilt is suffocating, but walking away to stand in the kitchen and stare blankly at the kettle for five minutes while they yell safely in another room is a heavily endorsed medical strategy to prevent you from completely losing your mind.

So, Tom from six months ago. Pick yourself off the floor. Stop trying to reason with an 18-month-old. They're not giving you a hard time; they're having a hard time. They're, despite the fact that they can now technically walk and throw snacks with frightening accuracy, just a baby.

Before you completely lose your grip on sanity, maybe take a look at our newborn collection to find the few things that actually help quiet the chaos.

Questions I frequently ask myself at 3 AM

Why do they cry so much in the evening?
Honestly, for a long time I thought it was because they specifically hated me, but our health visitor claimed it was the "witching hour." It’s apparently a neurological overload thing where their tiny, undercooked brains just can't process the end of the day. It peaks around six weeks and slowly fades, leaving you a hollowed-out shell of a human.

Can you genuinely spoil a newborn by holding them too much?
My mum swore we were making a rod for our own backs by never putting the twins down, but every modern pediatrician we spoke to said that's absolute rubbish. You can't spoil a newborn. They don't have the cognitive capacity to manipulate you; they just literally think they're going to die if you aren't touching them.

When does the fourth trimester honestly end?
Theoretically, around the three or four-month mark, when they suddenly "wake up" to the world, start smiling, and finally figure out that nighttime is for sleeping and not for aggressively demanding milk. In reality, it ends whenever you finally stop hallucinating from sleep deprivation.

Is swaddling seriously necessary?
It depends entirely on whether your baby enjoys being wrapped like a tight little burrito or if they treat it as a personal insult. We tried it because the books said it suppresses their startle reflex, but Maya fought her way out of every blanket like a tiny Houdini, so we just gave up and put her in a sleep sack instead. You just have to figure out what kind of baby you accidentally brought home.

How do you survive the absolute exhaustion?
You don't, really. You just mutate into a lesser, more caffeine-dependent version of yourself for a few months. You lower your standards for what constitutes a clean house, you eat a lot of cold toast over the sink, and you occasionally lock yourself in the downstairs loo just to enjoy the silence.