Timmy the Friendly Ghost

by Eve, in Parenting (No Comments)

I already miss some things about the little baby Timmy used to be. (Although, not enough to convince me to have another one any time soon.) In his ultrasound scans—the ones in which he had a discernible face, anyway—he looked like Casper the ghost, so I’d been delighted to find that his zip-up swaddle made him look like Casper even more. I found it uproariously funny to see Timmy cocooned into a ghost-shape when my husband would hold him out, wiggling Timmy’s lower half and making a low ghosty whistling noise. Because Timmy was so small at the time, the swaddle had an empty ‘tail’ at the bottom that obligingly swayed in accompaniment to the haunting whistle.

We only had a grey one, and I was so amused by the Casper jokes we’d make that I was determined to get a white one too. We needed another swaddle anyway. If the grey one was in the wash, it was extremely difficult to get mini-Timmy to sleep. He needed to be swaddled, otherwise would flail and keep himself awake, but he loathed having his arms pinned down, so it didn’t help to wrap him in a blanket. The Casper-swaddles were the only ones I’d seen that both restrained, yet allowed him to keep his arms up. Of course we needed a second one. And of course, it had to be white. Ghost white.

Theoretically, the only thing different between them is the colour, but for some reason the white one never seemed to fit him as well. It worked fine as a swaddle, but it didn’t have the same ghostlike quality. I was so disappointed.

It’s a moot point now though, because he’s grown enough to fill out the swaddles quite comprehensively, so he doesn’t look so incorporeal in them, when he’s in them at all. Now he likes to sleep completely independently of wraps. (He values his freedoms — whenever I take his nappy off, he just about throws himself off the changing table in his rush to run away from the new one.)

So now both Caspers are folded up in his wardrobe, looking forlorn, remembering the good ol’ days.

Looking at them, I feel a bit forlorn, too.