First full day at playgroup

This morning I had the exciting yet scary task of taking O to playgroup for her first full day. The car journey was full of merriment as we chatted about playing, fun and hard hats (her favourite toy from her first visit there).

To my joy and amazement when we arrived she walked confidently in front of me, straight to a table heavily laden with musical instruments and set to creating a beautiful racket.  I dropped off her bag, gave her a kiss and brief cuddle, narrowly dodging a maraca.  As I left her that maraca quickly became the most pleasant sound I’ve heard all day, she was happy to be left.

As the day at work wore on I struggled to stop trying to firing nervous glances at my phone, looking for any news of sadness from her.  But as 3:15 (school hometime) approached it looked more and more likely that she had managed it.

Once the children had left school, following an awesome day to finish off our first week together, I headed to playgroup to collect O.

As I walked into the room O threw her hands over her mouth in her trademark shocked face pose.  I leapt towards her, crouched to the ground and received a stunning cuddle and kiss.  The first day was at an end and O had had an amazing day.

She had played with some sand, painted a beautiful picture, eaten rather a lot of mash potato for lunch and stolen the African land snail’s cucumber whilst “helping” to feed it.

Victory!  And best of all, she’s looking forward to going again next week.

How many is too many?

My wife and I currently have 2 beautiful daughters (O is 2 years old and A is 3 months).  Many of our friends are pregnant with or are just having their second child and it seems that most people we know are happy with 2 children.  We on the other hand want more!

The problem that we currently have is the decision, how many children is too many?

For a long time we had said that 3 seemed like a sensible number for us but now that we’ve got 2 we can’t help but consider 4… or more!

Playgroup taster

This morning O is off to her new playgroup for her taster session. The bags are packed, her clothes are labelled, she’s excited and I’m feeling sad.

For the past year she’s gone to a wonderful childminder for 2 days a week whilst we’ve been working but our childminder had changed job so today is a totally new experience for us all.

I’ve been very excited for O about going to playgroup but now we’re finally at D Day it’s starting to sink in that she’s growing up.

Watching your children growing up is an incredibly emotional experience. Never before in life have I been so aware of the passage of time. All our Mummy and Daddy friends are also finding it hard to accept at times, every day our babies are a little bit older.

Every new thing they learn to do; smiling, rolling over, crawling, first steps, first words etc. is so exciting but marks important landmarks in a one way journey. Time sucks.

It’s also worth sharing that O is only at Playgroup for an hour and a half today. It’s not that length of time that she’s there that hurts though, it’s what this symbolises. Our little girl’s not quite as little as she was yesterday 😦

The Early Learning Centre thinks Dads are incompetent

This Blog post is in response to this article. http://goo.gl/6R2m0m from @dadwhoblogs

The Early Learning Centre (ELC) have created and posted this poster on their Facebook page.

Images courtesy of http://www.thedadnetwork.co.uk

Since finding out we were pregnant with our first baby we have been fortunate enough to make lots of new wonderful friends who are all sharing the experience of being parents. I have become good friends with a wonderful group of Dads all of whom I’m sure would not at all be impressed to see the opinion of such a well respected and established company as the ELC.

We know Mums and Dads where Dad works full time and Mum stays at home with the children, Mum and Dad both work part time and look after the child between then, Mum works full time and Dad looks after the children. I thought this was a fair representation of the society that we now live in. The gender differences are gradually being removed.

Young families are a great place to witness the changes in our society and how the roles of men and women are changing.

This poster from the ELC is very, very insulting to all those Dads who look after their families. I work full time but I do try to do as much with my children as I can. This list of questions for mum as opposed to the comment from Dad “where’s Mum?” unfortunately shows that there is still a lot of people out there who are unaware of the changes that are taking place in the roles of parents. I am just shocked that of all people to ask hold these old fashioned opinions that the ELC would be one of them.

Do you agree with the comment from the ELC? Is this really a fair representation of Mums and Dads?

Dad’s in the delivery room

This morning on Twitter I saw that @Netmums had posted the following

Should dads be at the birth? Catch our @SiobhanFreegard on @reallorraine with @kategarraway 0845 this morning! #lorraine

Now I don’t watch Lorraine so I don’t know how to television coverage went but I was really shocked that this question was worthy of a discussion on television.

I was at the birth of both of my daughters and I’ll be there for any more that we are lucky enough to have. All of my Daddy friends were also there for the birth of their children.

My problem with the discussion is the hint that dads should not be allowed to be at the birth. If dads don’t wish to be there for the birth then that is up to them, though personally I don’t understand this viewpoint.

Dad’s should however always have the option to be there. It is an incredible time and very important moment for a family, new or growing.

I’d like to think that the mother would want the father to be there to support her through labour. It should be a great opportunity to strengthen a relationship during a great trial that leads on to many, many more. I know that labour and the challenges of looking after a baby brought my wife and I much closer together as we had to support one another, working as a solid team of two. This period of time really starts with labour itself and though I know it is hard for Dads to know what to do to help during labour this should not put them off being there. A dad’s responsibilities to the mother and baby don’t start once the baby has been born, they should be there for them as much as they can

I know that many circumstances prevent Dads from being there for the birth of their children. I just hope that discussions like the one I saw on Twitter aren’t because people are keen to remove Dads from the birth of their children.

Squashed thumb – Am I the only one?

Try as I might to look after my girls, at lunchtime today I was able to squash her thumb in our back door.

I still feel sick.

I was just coming in from getting a hand pump to blow up her bunny. She was watching me and when I came in I shut the door behind me, completely missing the fact that she had one of her delicate little thumbs in the doorway.

She screamed, I tried to fight back my own tears and now I have a lingering guilt for injuring her.

Please tell me I’m not the only one out there who had accidentally hurt their own child.

6 Parenting Lessons I Learned From Indiana Jones

Dorkdaddy.com

y buddy Carter Gaddis (see? I spelled it right this time) at Dadscribe.com recently made a splash with his post “9 Things That Han Solo Taught Me About Being A Dad”. Not to be outdone, fellow dadblogger John Kinnear at AskYourDadBlog.com responded with “6 Parenting Lessons I Learned From Dr. Who.” But listen, gents… there’s another action franchise out there that has lots to teach us about parenting. Let’s not forget:

#1 “Asps. Very dangerous. You go first.”

Is there anything we wouldn’t do for our kids? If we could we would suffer every scraped knee, every broken heart for them. There is nothing more pathetic than seeing your child sick, or more terrifying than seeing your child hurt and knowing that there is absolutely nothing you can do for them. If we ever had to cross a…

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