My Baby Loves Trash

Or: How I Was Bamboozled By Big Baby

You don’t need to buy things for a baby to keep said baby happy and occupied. In fact, many small children are perfectly content playing with literal trash. Mine is. That’s why I keep an empty Mentos gum container in my car these days; an empty Mentos gum container with a spent chapstick tube inside has provided hours of soothing entertainment.

Watching my kid utterly enthralled with, say, a ball of tissue paper, empty Tupperware, or a clean paper plate has made Great Depression-era childhood delights like ball in cup seem comparatively high tech. Whatever kid invented the game where you use a stick to hit a hoop down the road was brilliant.

Oscar the Grouch was always my favorite Sesame Street muppet, so it’s cool that I ended up raising a tiny little trash monster of my own as an adult.

The thing is, babies do not know if something costs a lot of money or no money at all. They will reject a $200 mechanical swing in favor of lying down on the carpet. They will prefer the packaging to the toy inside the packaging.

They do not need special cloths to barf on; any soft clean cloth, including your own clothes, can be a burp cloth. I’ve used the tee shirt I was wearing to wipe my kid’s face and just thrown it in the laundry. It’s all fabric.

Nor do babies need a special tub to bathe in. We have a baby tub, and we’ve used that tub as a place to put the baby after she’s done bathing. We’ll line it with towels and whatever silly bathrobe she’s wearing (which she also doesn’t need, but it is cute) en route from the bathroom to the changing table. When she was really small, we ran a bath in the regular tub at a baby appropriate temperature, and my husband got in the tub and held her and let her kick around and splash to the extent that she was capable, and I served as a sort of out-of-tub assistant handling the washcloth. It was fine. When she got older and was able to sit up on her own, I’d put a laundry basket in the tub and fill it to an appropriate depth. Now, she just sits in the regular tub on a soft mat.

When she’s on her changing pad, sometimes I’ll hand her a small piece of cloth, which sufficiently occupies her while she’s getting dressed or changed. A piece of cloth.

This weekend, we went to another kid’s birthday party and she was entertained the entire time by a halfway crushed plastic water bottle.

At the grocery store, all it takes to keep her quiet and happy is to hand her a single piece of fruit or a vegetable. Sometimes she throws it because her favorite “bit” is making me pick things up off the floor and laughing, but she’s entertained nonetheless.

She’s too young to know what is and isn’t a toy, or what is and isn’t a baby product manufactured with her needs in mind and marketed in cutesy packaging. As far as she’s concerned, the world functions like one of those levels of an old computer game where you can interact with random objects by clicking on them. Everything is clickable, everything is a discovery. She is making one million new neural connections every second, many of them about how fun it is to play with trash.

As Juniper’s babyhood has advanced, I’ve found that a lot of specialized products I was positive I’d need in order to not be a Terrible Mother were largely unnecessary. I was bamboozled by Big Baby. We all want what’s best for our kids, but “good enough” is almost always fine. And sometimes they'll just want to play with garbage.

Image via screengrab/ Sesame Street Workshop