A photographer I once saw taking children's portraits in a department store was having trouble keeping a young baby sitting upright. The baby's mother reached into her bag and handed him a recently-filled, rolled-up disposable nappy. Without exchanging a word, the photographer propped the used nappy behind the baby's back, baby smiled, photographer snapped, and mum went away happy. All in a day's work for all three.
This is the kind of resourcefulness that's developed by anybody who spends much time around children. So nannies should be natural experts.
The trouble is, nannies often work for new parents. And the bulk of the baby products market seems to be aimed at new parents, or else status-conscious people with more money than sense. They're the target for all those hand-crafted wooden jigsaws, natural fleece huggy blankets and radial-tyred off-road prams that parents only buy once, until they learn that they can get by even better at the local jumble sale.
Then there's the timeless essentials given a modern spin. For centuries women in primitive societies carried babies in a piece of cloth wrapped around their neck and shoulder. Now it's a 'revolutionary' sling with a designer label and a 45 price tag.
Necessity is the mother of invention, but un-necessity seems to be the mother and father of thousands of baby and child gizmos. Another adage says that if you give a child some fancy new toy in a box, he'll throw away the toy and play with the box. In other words, if God had meant for us to buy a lot of pricey purpose-built TV tie-in toys, he wouldn't have invented junk modelling.
Give a child a chance to be creative - and a childcarer too. The nanny who is never allowed out of the house without an armload of expensive gadgets can't show how clever she is at improvising, say, a car window sun shield out of a Manchester United flag, with 'baby on board' felt-tipped on for good measure.
The DIY approach is often healthier, as well as cheaper and more entertaining. Take food - pulping a fresh vegetable in a blender and freezing it in ice cube trays beats jar baby food any day. Anyway, how much more fun for the children and nanny who all muck in together in the kitchen for that stuff you make by melting chocolate, marshmallows and Rice Krispies.
And DIY is bound to be safer. A new 'baby cry analyser' device being marketed is claimed to digitally analyse within 20 seconds the reason why a baby is crying, according to a symptoms chart for their carer to translate.
Hmm. Try telling a doctor in A&E, 'But the cry analyser said he was only hungry!' Like so many products, this one depends on believing that a machine is better at the skill that any baby-carer ought to be developing - getting to know the baby and tuning into their needs.
Another high-tech monitor worn by a toddler and their carer sounds a bleeper if the child wanders beyond a certain range. An alarm on it can also be set to remind the carer when it's baby's feeding time. Let's face it, if you need a bleeper to tell you that a child has wandered away, you aren't keeping a close enough eye on them in the first place. And in my experience, most babies come with a built-in alarm that goes 'Waaaah!' at feeding time without needing to be set at all.
There is an alternative to most gadgets on the market. An audio/video cam: keep looking in on the baby. A remote fever monitor: go and feel his temperature. A nappy-change distracter: pick him up and cuddle him. An IQ-boosting music CD: sing and play interactive finger games. A three-way front- and rear-view mirror attachment: stick your head out the car window and look behind you. There is no alternative as good as face-to-face eyesight and physical contact.
Which brings us back to nappies. Those perfumed nappy sacks - why not just use old supermarket shopping bags? While what you're disposing of is offending environmental campaigners on two counts, at least they're both going into the same landfill site.
