The Ladder of Celebrity, According to Our Eleven-Month-Old

Every twelve-month-old is a hero, and every six-month-old is a contemptible hanger-on, to an eleven-month old

Previously in this series: I am losing the war against the dogs who want to lick the baby, and a brief account of the baby’s crimes committed in the first nine months of life.

As the baby grows increasingly mobile, I find myself more and more often taking him out of the house to a special kind of playground for the under-four set. I had been used to think that there were only parks and playgrounds in the world, with no further distinctions or taxonomies to separate them, but I have since been relieved from my error. In fact, I am afraid you will be rather sneered at by those in the know if you ask for directions to a playground for toddlers. The correct nomenclature is “tot park.”

A tot park is very much like a regular playground, only instead of wood chips the ground is composed of something springy and highly recycled, and the slides and monkey bars are built much lower to the ground. Many tot parks are also littered with old baby walkers and activity centers, which the tots bump into periodically at random, lurching them further into the sandy recesses of the park before eventually abandoning them and wandering off.

You will not find anyone of kindergarten age in a tot park. In this way it resembles Logan’s Run or that village from Midsommar. Once you have started to learn your shapes and the more difficult back half of the alphabet, the tot park is no longer the place for you.