All Grown Up

Your chips will never be the same again

Let me talk to you about hot sauce.  Oh go on.  A really good hot sauce is a transcendent experience.  You see a really good hot sauce has the potential to completely ruin your meal because:

a) You will not be able to taste anything else for the rest of the day

and

b) Why would you want to?  

This is a really good hot sauce remember, which, when done properly is just the most sublime of tastes that there is (except for maybe a raspberry which is just the greatest flavour of them all).

It is not just hot sauce that is like this though, sometimes you experience something which just spoils you for everything else.  Something which is so far and above your ordinary experience that it leaves everything else lacking in lustre just a little, something which is of a quality that it seems as though it will never be matched, even though you keep trying to recreate the moment.  

Our daughter has been sleeping in her own bed now for a few weeks.  She moved out of her cot onto a mattress on the floor sometime in April and then graduated from that to her own bed, which at one time was stood on its end, with a second bed also on its end keeping it company, along with two mattresses, in a room which I was using as a study, which meant that if I ever wanted to get a book from the shelves down I first had to negotiate a sort of bed slalom.  It was a bit like having my own soft play room, which means I am one step closer to fulfilling my dream of converting a room in my house into a ball pool which can be accessed via a slide which will come down from the loft.  I can feel a Kickstarter campaign coming on.

Anyway N has now been sleeping in her full-grown, real person’s bed for quite a while now.  This has given her the freedom to get in and out of bed as she wishes, something which we have tried to impress on her that she shouldn’t be doing, but which she persists in anyway.  With this new freedom has come the ability to pull books from her bookshelf, handily not blocked by any form of bed-like obstacles.  This means that now, when we put N to bed we have to stock her up with a number of books for her to ‘read’ in bed before she goes to sleep.  She obviously can’t actually read, but every night she has a different set of books which she diligently marches her way through before settling down.

One night she must have been extra tired as when I went in to peek in at her as I was going to get ready for bed myself I discovered her lying on her side, hands clutching the book she had been reading which was still a little open in front of her.  It was at that moment that I knew I was spoiled.  She looked so grown-up nestled in her proper bed with her teddies surrounding her like a chorus of well-wishers as she prepared to go journeying with Rupert, and even though she has done the same thing since, and though every night now I have to go in to tidy the books off her bed, and even though she is almost always contorted with her teddies in heaps around her I will never be able to recreate that first time again.  These moments are fleeting, and precious and like a good hot sauce you will never forget them, but the rest of the meal won’t taste quite the same afterwards.  She is growing up so quickly, I’m just thankful I got to share that story with her.