Your baby's first autumn: the firsts nobody photographs

A baby's first autumn is mostly a season of textures.

Everything outside changes at once — the ground stops being flat and green and starts being loud and uneven, the air gets an edge, and every single walk turns into an investigation. For a baby who has only ever known one kind of weather, this is enormous news.

And almost none of it gets photographed, because none of it looks like anything.

What actually happens out there

The first leaf. Not picking it up — crushing it. There is a particular face babies make the first time something makes a noise when they close their hand around it, a kind of offended surprise, and it lasts about two seconds.

The first hat. Which comes off. Which goes back on. Which comes off. This is not a battle you win in the first autumn, and the number of times you put it back on in a single walk is a statistic worth having.

The first time they notice their own breath in cold air. The first puddle they are allowed in and the first one they are pulled out of. The first jacket that makes their arms stick out sideways, so they walk like a small furious starfish.

The first time the light goes early and they are confused by dinner happening in the dark.

Why these disappear so completely

Because none of them are milestones.

There is no box on any chart for "reacted to a conker." Nobody asks about it at the check-up. It doesn't go on the wall, it doesn't get announced to the family group chat, and it doesn't produce a good photo — a baby staring at a leaf mostly photographs as a baby staring at nothing.

"I have forty pictures of the pumpkin. I have none of him working out what wind was."

So the season gets remembered by its props. The pumpkin, the jumper, the pile of leaves you arranged. The actual discoveries — which is what the season was for him — go unrecorded, and by next autumn he already knows what leaves do.

That is the strange thing about first seasons. They are only available once. A second autumn is a completely different experience, and a fourth one is barely an event at all.

Worth writing down this month

None of this takes a project. A sentence after a walk is enough, and it will be worth more later than another photo of the same pumpkin.

• What they did with the first leaf they got hold of
• How many times the hat came off
• What they thought of wind — genuinely, the first proper gust
• Which texture they refused to touch
• What changed about bedtime when the light went early

The one that always surprises people

Ask a parent of a five-year-old what their child's first autumn was like and they will describe the clothes.

Ask what their child did, and there is usually a pause, and then something vague about liking leaves. The specific reaction — the offended face at the crushed leaf, the refusal to touch wet grass, the fascination with a drain — is gone, and it is gone for the ordinary reason that nobody thought at the time that it counted.

It counted. It just didn't look like it.