High chair, high jinks

Mum and Pa clambered all over the floor, aligning bits of wood and laboriously inserting screws and dials.

No, we weren't building some sort of escape-from-the-child raft; they're stuck with Sonny, for all his infuriating quirks. Rather, they were setting up for another one of those 'conventional milestones' that pepper these ramblings (see, inter alia, 'Milestones, not millstones' and 'The great eruption'). In this case, it was Sonny's First Time in A High Chair. Said seat (a discounted number from a department store, with assembly instructions squeezed into one sheet of double-sided paper) took the little fella's parents half a day to put together.

So, naturally, when we popped Sonny in, he nearly slid right out, like - to sanitise a famous comment by World War II general George Patton - 'food through a goose'. He was a tad too small to safely occupy the space. But that wasn't going to stop the party. No sirree.

Mum hauled up a cloth mat provided by Sonny's aunt and slid it in to pad things up. The gap was reduced, and then it was once more into the breach for Sonny. This time, he stayed put - for all the good it did us. After a few minutes, he began to subtly hint at his disapproval (though the neighbours might have suspected extensive chicken-slaughtering activities). When Mum tried to feed Sonny with the little fella ensconced in his new seat - since it was the idea of anchoring these feeding sessions that had sparked our assembly of the chair - he stoutly refused to play along.

We're still trying. But perhaps we were just a little too quick off the mark, and that Sonny simply needs a few more weeks to reach an optimal height or size for high-chair dining. Parents are apt to hope that their children reach their "targets", whatever these might be, with all possible speed when, sometimes, they just aren't ready. Apply too much pressure and a backlash could develop, and we're talking here not of anything as innocuous as feeding patterns as of educational achievements and the like.

In any case, it's not as though we're ever going to run out of new targets emerging even as the original ones are satisfied. We need to remind ourselves to just relax, lean back - in any sort of chair - and enjoy the parental ride.