Pancakes & Epiphanies

"Can you believe he was ever that small?”

Welcome to Baby Brain, a space where I – Charlotte, hi! – write about family life with three small children – Poppet (m, 5 years), Pickle (m, 4 years) and Peach (f, 1 year.) Those are not their real names. These are real stories from our days.

I took Poppet for pancakes this morning. It won’t actually have been this morning by the time that I get around to posting this but as it stands it was this morning, and we were on holiday, and we went for pancakes.

I didn’t write Baby Brain when Poppet was small, though I did keep a diary that was just for him and also had a blog called Milk Drunk, in which I documented small parts of who he was. As an overview rather than delving into those right now (because I don’t have access to those things whilst on holiday, you understand) I shall tell you that Poppet was an easy baby and a very lively toddler, with so much energy I had to avoid things like library rhyme time because instead of sitting still like the other children he would run around the stacks laughing his head off and making a scene while I begged him to stop. He used to literally go over to children and roar like a dinosaur in greeting because he was really into T-Rex’s, and I’d trail around behind him apologising for fear that people thought I’d taught him this was how to say ‘hey.’ He could spend six hours in a high energy children’s centre throwing himself at a wall, and never tire.

He was lovely.

He was a lot.

This morning, on our way to pancakes, Poppet and I were chatting when he stopped to point out the birdsong. “Sometimes I think I hear owls in the daytime,” he told me, “should we listen out for them?” I asked him if he wanted to chat at the same time and he pointed out that that would drown out the sound of the birds, which was fair enough. So we walked quietly to The Pancake House and we sat across from one another and shared a meal and had a chat, and all around me parents were fighting to keep toddlers under control and people were walking around with babies in prams and for the first time ever I really believed what I was saying when I caught their eye and – in my head, for they wouldn’t want to hear it – I said “it gets easier.”

“It gets easier, but you’ll miss this,” I said.

“It gets easier but you’ll miss this and, my god, can you believe he was ever that small?”

Ate his own then half of mine – beast mode.

Behind the paywall this month!

A rundown of our holiday at Center Parcs:

Center Parcs '25

A reflection on what it means to be doing enough, via the slides at soft play:

On Slides & Connectivity

Skills I removed from my CV, including “I have super human strength thanks to the ongoing and very real inability of my children to use their (perfectly functional) legs”:

Skills I Removed From My CV

And the meaning of paradise, written when Pickle was a newborn:

Speaking of Peppa...

Until next time 🥞