I woke up yesterday with sunlight streaming through the window onto the face of the sleeping baby beside me. The spring sun was lovely, but the baby was magical. For the last ten months, the babies have woken us up. This time, I woke up first. Perhaps it was the combination of the reasonable hour to be waking up and my biased mother’s eyes, but his little face was truly as sweet and round as a freshly-podded pea. This is a moment to treasure, I thought to myself, carefully stirring in bed so as not to wake him.

This morning I caught the other baby pushing herself backwards from all fours to sitting; something I knew she could do – she had secretly manoeuvred herself from tummy to upright the day before – but had not yet seen in action. It was so wonderfully exciting to see her understanding how to use her strength and coordination to such good use. How we cheered and clapped when she succeeded. I made another mental note.

I suppose we could be trying to capture these remarkable moments on video. Perhaps I should for their future interest, but I have no real desire for myself. No, these are the moments to be stored up in one’s mind for long family dinners or for idle hours on a park bench or for when my children have children and I start telling them all about how it was when they were young.

I sat in the sunshine outside our local bakery the other day, babies sleeping in the pram, when the man on the bench beside me told me he also had twins. They are now three, nearly four he told me, and oh what a joy they bring. The sight of him filled me with optimism; he seemed so relaxed and happy, eating his piece of cake on a spring-filled Sunday morning, no children in tow. Then we started talking about nights, foolishly perhaps on my side. No, they still don’t sleep well, I heard with horror. One wakes up and then the other one and they almost always end up in their parents’ beds. What, I thought indignant, I am sure I was promised all of this sleep deprivation would have faded into a distant memory by then.

That’s the thing when you starting talking to parents of older children. The conversations often provide some initial reassurance and then almost always seed some grain of doubt. My first experience of this was when talking to the mother of twins, eight months older than our two. She told me the first two months had been really difficult, but then they had this miraculous turning point when everything seemed to slot into place. Ten minutes later she remarked that the second afternoon of our acquaintance (when I was still pregnant and her babies were around four months old) was one of the most stressful she had ever lived through. Hmmm, not quite the turning point she had promised then. A few months later, I was walking in the park with another mother of twins, when we bumped into yet another of our type walking in the opposite direction. My immediate companion had just been telling me how she found life got much easier once her babies hit four months. But my hopes were then dashed by the next mother (her big eleven month old boys chewing on bread and sitting jolly in their pram), as she flashed me a sympathetic look and said, “the first nine months are ever so hard.”

The trick of self-preservation must be to stop believing everything you hear. It could be that there is no particularly easy phase with children, but also, in general, only a few fleeting moments when it is desperately hard. Then again, I always feel slightly smug when I look at younger babies, and think to myself – ooh, how nice to be through that phase. So perhaps it is getting easier. And, my optimism usually quickly returns when I tell myself these children are not our children, and ours , of course, will be very different.

We like to think of ourselves as adventurous parents, having undertaken all sorts of things the more risk adverse would not dare to do in the first year of their children’s lives. So it is not easy for us to admit a growing list of activities, to which we now hesitate to the point of inertia before agreeing, and includes baby swimming, playgroups and meeting friends with other children at play cafes. Sad to say, through a process of trial and error, we have discovered that these said activities leave us feeling all worn out for a very small amount of pleasure in return. Put simply, they are more hassle than they are worth. Our most recent of these experiences – our first family trip to the local swimming pool – perhaps shows why.

An expedition only possible because we had a friend staying for the weekend, we thought, rashly, that the adult to baby ratio (3:2) would be sufficient to make the whole trip a breeze. We had decided to take a taxi. Parking nearby would be too difficult and we did not want to take the pram nor carry the babies a long distance in the cold. A very big taxi: swimming gear for five certainly mounts up. So there we were in our very big taxi with our two babies, two baby car seats, three bags of swimming gear and three adults and now needed to get into the pool. It turns out swimming pool buildings are much warmer than it is outside at the moment. We did not have much fun carting our loot from the taxi into the changing rooms in our winter coats, nor did we have much fun realising we would have to try and store the two baby car seats in the swimming lockers whilst putting the babies somewhere else, they in their winter coats (snowsuits). But at some point we took off our coats and came up with the cunning plan to take the babies in the car seats to the edge of the pool. We also discovered the changing tables round the corner and managed to unpeel rosy cheeked babies down to swimming nappies, carefully pulled on before we set off from home. That was when the adventure blossomed into its brief moment of pleasure. Warm water, bright faces, glittering eyes, big splashes and raucous laughter – everything you expect from a happy first swimming trip. Oh, we did enjoy those full fifteen minutes. Then it was back off to the overheated changing rooms, back to balancing babies precariously on changing tables whilst attempting to get changed ourselves, the nasty surprise that we had got the car seats all wet in the process, carrying everything outside again, and waiting for another very big taxi. You might say, for want of better taste, an interactive map short of a military operation.

We could strive to refine our approach. A few tweaks (such as walking there with the pram, or wearing easier clothes ourselves) and an additional adult and I think we could have the whole affair down to something manageable. Same with playgroups and play cafes. We could, and we would be back in the adventurous parent gang. Call me a spoil sport, but anything that involves removing and pulling back on two snow suits, when it is not in our own home, is just not worth it to me for the next month. Roll on spring, say the babies.