My Failed Quest to Get My Baby to Wear Sunglasses

The impossible dream

There are things that may be as adorable as a baby wearing sunglasses– when elderly dogs have elderly owners and they go on slow arthritic walks together, those tiny bottles of ketchup that sometimes come with room service, the surprised brr? sound cats make when they are woken up from sleep– but there is nothing more adorable than a baby wearing sunglasses. So, naturally, when I had a baby, I hoped that one day she would grow into a little toddler who loved to wear sunglasses.

So far, no dice.

I registered for a tiny little pair of baby sunglasses when I was pregnant. We still hadn’t agreed on a name in case the baby turned out to be a boy, but we were in consensus on some lower-stakes decisions, like whether the baby and Josh should have matching sunglasses. (Answer: yes.)

[There’s also the fact that we live in a place that gets more than 300 days of sunshine per year, if not more, and there’s practical value in having a child accustomed to donning protective gear over their eyes.]

The baby specs are red, like this pair of adult-sized plastic aviator frames Josh found at a thrift store on Virgil. They look like something the leader of a group of 1980’s fast food kids’ meal mascots would wear, not a man in his forties, but he somehow pulls them off.

I waited until Juniper had made it through the thick of her newborn phase and seemed a little bit more like a tiny human than a furious baked potato before I tried them on her for the first time. I had such high hopes. I hadn’t really thought it through.

The first time I put the little glasses on her face, they were not well-received. She clawed at them with the horror and rage of a side character in Alien that had been attacked by a face hugger. Screams. Screams of terror.

Before anybody accuses me of willingly subjecting my kid to a traumatizing experience, it’s important to note that she flies into a baby-rage whenever she’s even a little bit uncomfortable, because nothing bad has ever happened to her. Still, I could see that Juniper did not like thoses sunglasses and that it probably wouldn’t serve anybody if I pushed it. So I gave it a rest.

I tried again some months later. The results were slightly better in that she did not immediately start crying, but she did not wear them for long enough for me to take a photograph.

At that point, rather than abandon my baby in sunglasses vision, I decided to troubleshoot. Perhaps the problem was this particular pair of sunglasses, not sunglasses themselves, as a concept.

So, in the interest of research, I got her a second pair of red sunglasses, heart-shaped ones, a different brand this time. I was able to cajole her into wearing these for long enough to take a photo, but just barely.

Onward and upward.

One night after one too many glasses of wine, I was served up an Instagram ad encouraging me to check out this cute brand of baby sunglasses. Maybe, I thought, these will be the glasses that change the trajectory. I bought them.

They arrived in the mail. Juniper rejected them.

This is where things got a bit out of hand

A few days later, searching for a birthday gift for my nephew on Maisonette, I found myself drawn to the sunglasses section. Before I knew it, there were four pairs of baby sunglasses by four different brands in my shopping cart. They arrived, as Maisonette orders do, one item at a time over the course of a week.

“It’s for an experiment!” I told Josh, who was visibly annoyed that more crap was arriving at the house.

“What experiment?”

“I’m trying to get Juniper to wear sunglasses and I’m experimenting with different pairs of them.”

He rolled his eyes, clearly skeptical of the fact that this quest even qualified as an “experiment,” as it was just as “experimental” as taking a bunch of clothes into a fitting room to test whether or not any of this season’s latest styles made me look skinnier. But even my anti-clutter, consumerism skeptic husband who had tee shirts that were old enough to vote could not deny that he, too, wanted to figure out a way to get the baby into some sunglasses. He could not endorse the experiment but he would not interfere with it. I respected that.

I presented my 8-month old with a pair of white frames in a classical Wayfarer shape, a pair of white frames with yellow lenses that looked like little daisies, white 60’s cat-eye style frames, and a pair called “pink lemonade,” neon pink and neon yellow.

She allowed a couple of those frames to remain on her face for several seconds before casting them to the ground like an angry god. I took a photo and sent it to a friend who commented that Juniper looked great in sunglasses.

Sigh. She did. For nanoseconds at a time.

The quest continued. I tried sunglasses with straps to hold them in place (rage!), sunglasses that are a little too big for her face, round sunglasses, square sunglasses. I’ve set the array of baby sunglasses in front of her like a tray of small bites during a pre-wedding reception cocktail hour, and she has only selected sunglasses for the purpose of putting them in her mouth.

I have tried almost everything and must now admit that the baby has always hated sunglasses and will likely continue to hate them for the foreseeable.

If I’ve learned anything about having a roommate that is a baby, though, it’s that nothing is forever. Maybe I’ll try again in a couple of months and see if she’s open to eyewear of any kind. But I fear my time grows short. In two months she’ll be nearly 11 months old, which is almost a year old, which means she almost won’t even be a baby anymore.

Where did the time go? And what am I supposed to do with all these baby sunglasses?

Original Illustration by Tara Jacoby | Instagram