“What was your favourite gift you were given when your baby was born?” It’s a regular icebreaker question in parent and baby classes and the responses are always varied and interesting, and tell you a lot about your fellow parents, their values and their priorities.
 
For me, I had two answers. The first was a classic: a lovely colleague who had started quilting classes made my daughter an absolutely beautiful cot quilt, the sort of thing we will keep and treasure forever. Handmade gifts are a wonderful way of expressing care because of the time and love that goes into them.
 
My other answer was my most unexpected and probably least expensive gift: a good friend whose baby is exactly a year older than mine gave me a little care package. In it was a hand cream (“for all the extra hand washing”), a bottle of washing up liquid which she had accidentally discovered was great as a pre-wash stain treatment for baby poo, and some nappy rash cream (“good to have ready, just in case”). We were really lucky and we never needed the nappy rash cream, but we got through the hand cream within the first month, and I’ve shared the tip about the washing up liquid with most of my friends as they became parents too! What I loved was the thought behind the package. My friend and I have both moved away from where we grew up, and now live far apart, but it felt like a hug in a Jiffy bag. It’s fun buying cute baby outfits, but that’s what everyone does for new babies, and parents will likely have stocked up on most of what they need before the baby is born. My experience was it was so much nicer to get something that came from my friend’s experience of what it was like looking after a newborn in the cold winter months. It was also a gift for me and my husband (actually he used most of the hand cream). The message was: “look after the parents”. Looking back, the same friend also recommended books I found really helpful, like those by La Leche League about sleep and breastfeeding, and most of all, a really responsive WhatsApp conversation which reassured me at various difficult moments. Connection and support, in different forms, was what I valued the most.

I first came across this phrase a couple of years ago when I was watching a Sadhaguru video on Youtube and my daughter was still very small. He spoke of how we cannot expect our children to be a certain way, if we are not, we do not need to direct our efforts of teaching onto our children for them to learn.
 
Our children are like sponges they absorb and take in everything around them, they learn to talk and walk without us physically or directly teaching them. They have picked up how to say goodbye or hello as they have seen us do it so many times.