Anti-natal

These are my discoveries about holidays with a baby: the first time we went away, to Cornwall, it took me a day and a half even to make the list of things we needed, and then another day and a half to face up to the magnitude of having to find them all, and then another day and a half to pack them. My best friend said, "Laminate the list", and I thought, "You big square", but since then I have missed the list so much that I have actually dreamt I still had it.

The second holiday, when T was a bit more mobile and saucy, was when we discovered that it was just like being at home, only without all your stuff, doubly so if you forgot to laminate your list. That was in the Lake District. Man, it was hard work. (I think I would have been more acclimatised to this if C was more trouble on holiday, but he is legendarily peaceful company. If you lie him on a pink surface, you don't even know he's there.)

For the bank holiday, we went away to my stepmother P's house near a beach. I had it so sorted; I had the bath thermometer and the night light. I had a tonne of bottles and plastic spoons and formula and measuring thingos. I had all the stuff I really needed but had forgotten four months earlier; only in the meantime, T had changed in every way calculable. He no longer notices whether the night light is on. He can get happily into a hand-hot bath. He's nearly a year old; he could drink cow's milk if he had to. He cares nothing for spoons, whatever they're made of.

Indeed, that's all he's got in the way of an eating habit: anything as long as it's not with a spoon. He would rather lick food off a razor blade (well, I'm guessing. That's not evidence-based). Last time we went away, he ran through a week's clothes in the first evening, and by midweek someone accused me of washing his T-shirt in toast. This time, I packed all his clothes, and he was naked for most of the time (nappy rash). The lamination period is over.

This is one of those pearls of wisdom that would really take the stress out of the early days - that everything is a phase, that the phases themselves are

incredibly short, that all these things people talk about, the sleep deprivation, the bedtime nightmares, the possessiveness over toys, the sudden separation anxiety, the colic, the weird spots, these things all pass, and I don't mean that in a poetic, "after a few weeks" way, I mean they don't even last as long as a cricket match. T's separation anxiety, which I must admit I'd been looking forward to (yes it's hell, but it is also quite cute) lasted exactly one and a half days. Ten months I waited, for a trauma that popped up sporadically for 36 hours and was replaced by a fascination for a rainbow toy.

Anyway, don't get me wrong, holidays have not become easier, they have just become hard in a different way. He is easier in the car, easier to put to bed, and easier since we got a travel cot and didn't just rely on finding a really large drawer (and here is another piece of unadulterated truth: when you keep on thinking, "Shall I get a Maclaren, even though I've already got a buggy? Shall I get a travel cot, even though we've already got a regular cot?" then the answer is yes).

But he is also now a delinquent; a wrecking ball of such determination and joy that it is hard to mind, apart from when you look round and there's all this broken stuff everywhere. I didn't notice in our own house, I guess, because everything is already broken or maybe all our things are plastic. At P's it was carnage. There hasn't been such wanton destruction of tiny decanters and small hand-mirrors since Cromwellian times. I kept looking at him, beaming away with a knick-knack in his hand, and I'd be thinking, "I've got time to put down this coffee before he breaks ... Nooo!"

Now, maybe if I laminated his thumbs ...