The Joys of Pappaledighet

Ah....This is the life....

I dropped my son of at dagis and then headed into Västerås to wander around with my daughter and watch the world go by. We started by walking around Lillåudden and enjoying the sun shinning over Lake Mälaren and then continued along the harbour before following Svartån into the city centre. Since my daughter was still asleep I took the chance to sit in a coffee shop for some morning fika and watch the people heading off to work (suckers!).

The mornings are definately the best, since the little angel sleeps really well so long as I keep her moving. In the afternoons, I need to feed her and then feed me and then its not so long until we have to colect my son again. He is often over tired when he gets home, so it can be a real struggle to keep home happy and then of course there's dinner to prepare...

The dream ends tommorrow when I return to work for five days where its back to endless meetings and working my fingers to the bone slaving over a hot keyboard. But for now I can look forward to the next time I'm at home...

Baby 2.0 User Guide

Today is the first day of my paternity leave. For the next 12 months I will be ay home for one week looking after my daughter and then at work for one week looking after me project!

So Last night my wife and I sat down to write the User Guide, a sheet of paper telling me what and when to feed her, when she sleeps and how to keep her happy when its time to leave or collect our other child from daycare. This should be enough to get me through the first week, until my daughter has me properly 'schooled in'.

Working 50% for a year is the same solution we used for our first child and it worked really well. I got to see his development for a full year instead of onlu 6 months, whilst at the same time keeping that adult contact at work and staying 'in the loop'.


The weather today has been fantastic. We went out for a two hour walk through the forest and my daughter slept the whole time. I really hope this will continue......

The Myth of Baby Toys

When you're a first time parent you want to provide your child with the right kind of stimulation. You look for toys which are going to help the childs development and are perfectly safe for your little angel to play with. The magazines are full of advice on what things to buy and you would never dream of buying anything which is for an alder child for fear of it being swallowed or breaking etc.. Like everything else, you're guided by experts saying what you should and shouldn't get and a good dose of guilt to make sure you toe the line.

Then the next little angel comes along, except this time the house isn't full of pedagogically designed plastic toys in big bright colours but instead full of little metal cars, plastic dinosaurs and wooden trains. It would be impossible to stop them playing with these toys, especially once they start crawling, as you can't watch them 24-7. Actually its my two and a half year old who stops my daughter from playing with things she's too young for by ripping them out of her little hands a shouting, 'Ney, sluta bebbe, Tristam's tåg!'. I susupect though that his motives are not very altruistic.

So here is a list of my 7 month daughters top five things to play with, which can be used as a reference for any first time parents.

1. Old nappies tied up in a hundpåse


2. Power cables for lamps


3. Woooden trains from IKEA


4. Squeeky plastic bath duck


5. Small toy cars

Also, what strange kind of sixth sense lets a baby know the difference between the old, broken mobile phone she is allowed to play with and daddy's nice new one she is absolutelu not supposed to dribble all over?

Pink for Girls -It's all in the Genes (and the blouses and the skirts..)

A Study by the University of Newcastle has concluded that women prefer redder shades when given a choice. They checked more than 200 men and women to choose between different colours. Just to make sure the women were not just showing cultural conditioning, they also tested a control group of Chinese people who are not brought up to associate pink with the feminine.

Of course this does not excuse the clothes shops from only stocking pink and white girls’ clothes in their stores. I can't stand the fact that we are so limited when looking for clothes for our 7 month old daughter. I don't want to dress her up as a Barbie doll or a princess, but it is next to impossible to find clothes which do not have pink in them or cute little flowers or other 'girlie' things. My son’s clothes have animals and dinosaurs and tractors on them... much more fun.

I hope my daughter will grow up to be confident and strong and independent and not pink and fluffy and I refuse to dress her up in a way which is being imposed on me by a society which expects little girls to be little pink princesses. Luckily our first child was a boy so she gets to where his clothes.

People are always assuming she is a boy, but I don't care, because for one thing the darker colours she wears are much better at hiding the dirt/food/sick etc....

Humans do appear to be 'hard wired' to have an underlying liking for blue and this is not so biased between men and women so why can't we have girls clothes in blue...with tractors on....

Just a Perfect Day

One of things I love most about working in Sweden is the freedom which flex time allows. When I worked in the UK it was all very rigid, we started at 9.00am and finished at 5.00pm.

Today though at 14.00pm I decided to flex out and enjoy what might be the last of the summer sun and take my son swimming at 'Gropen' in Hökåsen.

I wasn't the only one either, many of my collegues left early to enjoy the sunshine too. Flextime is like freedom of expression, or the right to vote, it should not be taken for granted since not everyone in the world gets the chance to make use of it. It makes the balance between work life and home life so much easier to manage and it gives you opportunities like today, to go off and spend some quality time outdoors with the kids.

Bunking Off

Next week more people will be back at work and normality is beginning to be restored. So this seams like a good time to take a day off before the pressure returns.

I'll be taking my son to the swimming pool, it will be the first time he's been to a pool for about a year. I had hoped to take him to Björnön or Gropen this summer, but the weather has never allowed it.

Living with Bilingual Children

At home I mostly speak English to my 2.5yr old son, whereas my wife speaks Swedish to him and he also picks up a lot of Swedish from the other kids at day care. In the past he has mostly only spoken Swedish but he understands English very well when I speak to him. Now he has started mixing the two languages more and more.

I've trained him to say bye-bye when he leaves somebody, but if a Swede says hey-då instead he somethimes replies bye-då.

Also, I've taught him all the English animal noises as well, so he knows English pigs go 'oink-oink' instead of 'nöff-nöff' and that English frogs say 'ribbit'.

He can also sing along to both 'Ba-Ba Black Sheep' and 'Bä, Bä, Vita Lamm' and can do the actions to both 'Incy-wincy Spider' and 'Imse Vimse spindel'.

If he wants to get my attention he repeatedly shouts pappa-pappa and if that does not work he switches to 'daddy-daddy'

Eventually, when he develops an attention span of more that 5 minutes, I'll start him on English children's TV shows.

I only hope my own Swedish will be able to keep up with him....

The Thief of Time

Finally after all these years I have got my hands on the last Harry Potter book.

Within its covers all the answers will be revealed and all the plot twists laid bare.

But I can't bloody read it !!!!!!

The problem is that I have two small children aged 2.5yrs and 6 months who don't allow me a moment to myself.

During the day they demand constant attention and if I try to sit down to read the eldest will poke his face into the book to see what I'm doing or will start shouting for me to come over and look at his train set.

In the evenings we put them both to bed at around 7.00pm, it takes about half an hour to get the eldest into bed an read him a story etc.. Then the youngest wakes up again wanting more food, so we feed her. Her brother will then start climbing out of bed and running around upstairs. We then get another hour of constantly going up and down to put the little bugger back! My wife and I feel like a tag team where one of us is constantly jumping up to sort one of them out.

By about 9.00pm they have finally settled down, so I can pursue more important things (like reading Harry Potter books, blogging and watching Series 3 of Doctor Who, which my brother kindly sent over from England).

Edward Young famously wrote that 'Procrastination is the Thief of Time'

He had clearly never met my kids - I'd love to have enough free time to procrastinate.

Anyway I am off now to discover when Ron Harry and Hermione will stop running around the countryside and get on with the story.