THE oldest of baby clichés has become reality. Our little girl is fixated with rubbish. Not just any rubbish, of course, but rubbish that was previously employed to wrap presents.
My wife employed our daughter to help her open her birthday presents recently.
They averaged around eight or nine gifts a day. My daughter has no future on a production line.

Being only seven months old, her gift-opening skills were hardly an incisive, clinical affair. She lacks the finesse and precision of a surgeon. But then, she lacks the finesse and precision of an elephant.
Like most parents and babies during any gift-opening occasion, there is a compromise. We tear off a strip of wrapping paper and she attacks it like a pack of hyenas stripping a carcass.

It’s a consistent but protracted process. She grabs at the torn wrapping paper and pulls off a miniscule piece. We smile at her fine motor skill development. She confuses the wrapping paper for rice cereal and sticks it in her mouth. We panic. She starts chewing and giggling. We wrench open her mouth and pull out the offending paper with all the panache of a drunken dentist. She giggles again. Then we repeat the entire process. All day long.

Our baby is at a stage where she mistakes every object with rice cereal: wrapping paper, toys, a newspaper, the TV and even the sofa. Everything is edible. Nothing is off-limits, including us. I have more cuts on my battered fingers than a bare-knuckle boxer.
That’s why festive occasions are all about the wrapping paper. For a baby, it is plentiful, manageable, chewable and digestible.
Her obsession kicked off at Christmas. By the end of the festive season, she was a wrapping paper addict. She would roll from one end of the living room to the other, passing several colourful, bulky toys along the way, to grab a piece of stray wrapping paper sticking out from under the sofa.

Her selective myopia is quite extraordinary. She can be quite oblivious to her father’s face when it is right in front of her and imploring her to eat her mashed-up broccoli, but she can spot a stamp-sized piece of wrapping paper on the floor in the next room.
Gift tags are another mystery. Next year, we are going to write on all her tags, “have a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, love your mum and dad. This message will self-destruct in five seconds, once you eat it.”

If wrapping paper was considered basic food and drink, then a gift tag was a five-course meal at a Michelin-rated restaurant. Like a fine wine, a gift tag was something to be savoured, something to be sucked on, rather than chomped down in a single bite.
If left to her own devices, a gift tag could occupy our child for an entire afternoon. Naturally, this could never happen because our little girl, in her enthusiasm to sample the exotic fare as soon as possible, would shove the whole thing into her mouth sideways.
Not only was this rather dangerous because there was the risk of choking, but the ill-fitting gift tag also made both her cheeks protrude and, from a certain angle, turned our adorable angel into the Joker.
Thanks to her generous, extended family, our lucky little girl was fortunate enough to open gifts that included a swing and slide set, a rocking horse and more educational books than a library.
Not one of them generated the level of joy that came from sucking the wrapping paper or biting her two teeth down on every gift tag.
With her first birthday approaching in a few months, we fear the consequences of handing her a birthday card.
She will eat it.

British author Neil Humphreys’ latest book, Be My Baby: On the Road to Fatherhood, is a best-seller and available at all bookstores