Category: Eve

*** not the actual tape but it looks just like this one.

My parents have an old BASF audio cassette tape with a collection of recordings of me at about two years old singing and talking and saying nursery rhymes. It was recorded on an old brown cassette player which was the height of techno-gadgetry back when I was a toddler. It’s funny when you think of all the modern ways there are now to capture your child’s every move and utterance. This generation of children won’t be able to get away from images and recordings of themselves at every stage of their growing up but back then that cassette was as good as it got.

Listening to the tape I’m struck by how much like Eve I sounded. I’m told all the time that she looks like me at that age but it’s strange to hear my voice from all those years ago and for it to be like listening to Eve. The thought that gets me the most though is that my first memories start somewhere in there. I don’t remember being recorded, but I do remember that brown casette player. I have hazy memories of some of the people I talk about on the tape and of being the flower girl at my aunt’s wedding just a few months later when I thought I was getting married to the page boy. It gets me because it means that any time now Eve might have her first memory.

It’s not like the other firsts we’ve already had…first word, first step, first tooth…for some reason it seems far more important. It’s as if everything up to now has been the warm-up because our mistakes won’t be remembered. So if we were to, say, accidently fall down the stairs with her, well it’s ok because she wasn’t hurt and she’ll have no memory of it. Not so now! Anything we do might become that first recalled incident and if we mess up then it’ll stick.

It’s as if we’ve just left the Ready, Steady portion of parenting and we’re into the GO!

We brought Eve to the cinema for the first time last Thursday. It may sound funny, but I was kind of nervous about it. I know (because I used to be in the same position) that a lot of people think parents of small children do things just to annoy them. You hear it everywhere, from planes to restaurants: “Why,” they ask, “do people bring children here?” The understanding being that these places are for grown-ups alone and for the most part I agree; A nice restaurant isn’t the place for a small child and a plane is hellish enough without a screaming toddler kicking the back of your chair.

The problem is that it gets to the point where you can be intimidated into never leaving your house, even to go to the places that are meant for children. Either that or you develop the thick skin that screams, “yea, my kids are little monsters but you’re just going to have to live with it!” (Hmm, t-shirt slogan perhaps?) Neither option appeals to me.

We chose our film carefully and planned the timing with military precision. A sweltering Thursday afternoon and a showing of a film that’s been out for over a month (Over the Hedge) would mean the cinema was fairly empty. Eve went down for a nap at the prime time to ensure a balance of adequate length and precision waking time so she was at her freshest and least cranky. Even with all this planning, as we walked into the cinema foyer and she squirmed to get out of my arms so she could explore, I wondered if we were making a mistake. She’s too young to stay still for so long, I thought, she’ll want to run around the cinema and climb up to the screen or crawl under the seats. There’s no way her attention will be held and we’re sure to have a meltdown when we try to get her to stay in her seat. Already I imagined the other cinema-goers would be looking at us and thinking “I certainly hope they’re not going to the same film as us!” I faked some of that thick skin and ploughed on.

In the end the whole thing passed off beautifully. The second the lights went down Eve was entranced. She sat on my lap the whole way through, her eyes wide and glued to the screen. I enjoyed the film (the animation on the Grizzly bear and the hyperactive squirrel was priceless) but I found myself watching Eve more than the screen. Every now and then she’d look back at me with a huge grin on her face as if to say, “Can you believe how cool this is!? A giant cartoon!” I wondered if she would remember it like I remember my first cinema film, “The Jungle Book”, which I went to see in the Savoy when I was just a little bit older than Eve is now.

When the inevitable slow moment came about a third of the way through, a bag of popcorn was plenty to keep her occupied until the final act sped things up again. Matt and I walked out of the cinema with stunned smiles on our faces as a world of opportunities to leave our house opened up before us.

Next week it’s “Cars.”