...and the fear of pegs

I was one of those babies that always got into mischief when Mum and Dad weren’t looking. They discovered this fairly early on in my life, and so they made sure that one of them always had an eye on me. Mum took me pretty much everywhere that she went. I splashed in the mud while she did some gardening. I crawled about the kitchen floor while she prepared dinner. I sat under the clothesline while she hung out the laundry to dry.

This last one was my favourite. I loved sitting under the clothesline and pulling at the clothes that Mum had just hung up, often succeeding in ripping them off of the line. Of course, Mum did not find this as hilarious as I did, so she devised a cunning plan to prevent me from re-dirtying the previously clean laundry.

She covered me with pegs. An ingenious idea. I would be too distracted by removing the pegs to pull at the washing, leaving her with enough time to finish her task, for once. She ended up with more than enough time to finish hanging out the washing, because like any other child less than a year old, my fine motor skills hadn’t quiiiiite developed yet, and a task as simple as removing pegs from clothing was an arduous and difficult task.

It was around about this time frame where I developed a mild fear of pegs. While they didn’t hurt me in the slightest, I came to fear the pegs being clipped on to me every time Mum went to do the washing. 

And that’s how I learned not to pull the washing off the clothesline.