20 thoughts from my 20th month as a parent

Read about baking, bilingualism and bicycles in my latest monthly round-up of some of my little highlights of being a parent…

1. Our son recently helped to prepare dinner but started crying when we put it in the oven. I think we’ll have to try to help him get over this as I don’t fancy switching to a raw food only diet.

2. Any idea what the following have in common: an Alan key, a bank card reader, a stone, a toy car, cuddly toys, a large piece of polystyrene packaging and a plastic spoon? They’re all things that our son has tried to take to bed with him in the last few months.

3. In the last few weeks, our son has enjoyed pushing a doll round our front room. However, it looks like he still needs to work on his baby carrying technique (see below). 4. When picking up our son, I often count to three in Welsh (‘un, dau, tri’) and then say ‘whoosh’ as I lift him off the ground. He now seems to think that ‘whoosh’ is Welsh for four.

5. After cycling home from work, it was great to come in to see our son having fun on his new tricycle. He was moving around pretty quickly but I don’t think he’d be able to keep up with me on my trip to work on the cycle path yet. 6. On the way to work last month, I saw a man who had painted his face purple. I think he was doing it for MAUVEmber.

7. When I bought a new bicycle recently, I decided to get one that had a horn on the handlebars. I tried to explain to our son that this was because I thought I might win the no bell prize.

8. While eating yoghurt today,19 month old son stopped, put finger in air and said ‘potato’. Can’t think where he gets weird sense of humour.

9. On a visit to a butterfly farm recently, our son’s two favourite things were washing his hands in the sink and watching a member of staff use a hoover. He wasn’t as interested in the meerkats or the llamas. 10. Our son met Father Christmas for the first time at the same butterfly farm recently. He enjoyed it even less that seeing the meerkats or the llamas. Still, he did at least get a little red football from the man with the beard.

11. Talking of Christmas, how did Mary and Joseph know that Jesus was 7lb 6oz when he was born? They had a weigh in a manger!

12. Our son said the word ‘funny’ for the first time a few weekends ago. I’m surprised it’s taken him over 19 months given the quality of my jokes.

13. Our son has shown an interest in some books more than others recently. A few nights ago, he quickly gave up on his Thomas the Tank Engine book before spending ages engrossed in a book of ice cream recipes.

14. In fact, he’s been so interested in reading that I’m thinking of employing him as a researcher for this blog. He’s been hard at work on this task recently (see below). 15. He’s also keen to play a role in writing on the blog now… 16. In fact, our son was actually on eBay when I took the photo above. He was trying to put in a bid for Rudolph and Blitzen. I had to stop him and tell him that we couldn’t buy them as they were two deer.

17. Our son quite enjoyed helping to decorate our Christmas tree recently. However, he also enjoyed starting to un-decorate it (see picture below). 18. Our son seems to be looking forward to Christmas at the moment, although I’m not sure quite to what extent it is capturing his imagination. At a recent Christmas market, I thought that he was pointing up at the decorations but instead he started saying ‘seagull, seagull’. In some ways this is a good thing as seagulls are present in North Wales for a larger proportion of the year than Christmas decorations.

19. The floor of our living room in our house was recently covered with toys, as it often is. This apparently wasn’t enough for our son. He went into the kitchen and grabbed two leeks to play with. Leeks are very much associated with Wales but it’s not – as far as I’m aware – customary for toddlers in Wales to use them as toys.

20. Our son recently started trying to peel the labels off tin cans in our food cupboard. Next time we try to make a Thai curry, it might have coconut milk in it or it might have baked beans instead. What do you think of this post and what do you remember from your first two years as a parent? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+. Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

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A toddler’s Christmas in Wales

As a child, I generally spent Christmas in Scotland with my parents and sometimes we went to see family in Ireland over the festive season. We also spent Christmas 1982 in California as we lived in San Jose from 1982-1983. As our son’s only 19 months old, we haven’t really got into a Christmas routine yet as last year was his first Christmas. Indeed, he was kind enough to write me a blog post about what it was like.

At the age of only 8 months old, our son was kind enough to write a blog post about his first Christmas…

Last year, we went to the south east of England to spend Christmas with about twenty members of my wife’s family. This year, we’ve decided to do things slightly differently. We moved to a new house just over three months ago and have decided to invite my parents and my wife’s parents to spend Christmas with us here in Wales as we now have a bit more space. The local area is rural and quite hilly and I’d go as far as saying that it can almost look like Narnia when it snows.

I’d really like there to be snow this year as our son is yet to have his first experience of walking in snow or building a snowman. That said, wet weather will be good too as I know that Santa Claus thinks that it helps his rain-deer. As you may have guessed from the last sentence, I’m quite keen on the British tradition of telling corny jokes at Christmas. In fact, I talked about this last year in a post entitled 5 things I like about Christmas in the UK.

In a lot ways, we probably don’t always have a very traditional British Christmas as my wife, son and I are vegetarian. Instead of having turkey, we often make a spicy nut roast with tomato chilli gravy. We do have the traditional roast potatoes and brussel sprouts, but I quite like to stir fry the sprouts with soy sauce, chilli and paneer (an Indian form of cheese). At work last year, my colleagues collectively decided to forego a traditional Christmas meal for our end of term evening out and instead had a fantastic Chinese buffet. Consequently, we had fortune cookies rather than Christmas crackers. As it happens, we’re going back to the same place for our pre-Christmas outing again this year.

Our son has already been getting into the Christmas spirit and has been enjoying wearing his two Christmas jumpers. We actually let him wear them before December had started as we went to a Christmas market about ten days ago in the nearby town of Llandudno. Doing anything to mark Christmas before it’s actually December, such as putting up decorations, doesn’t really feel right but it was fun to take him out to the market.

As it happens, some of the students that I teach at university were talking a few weeks ago about how they found it irritating to see decorations up while it was still November. I had to break it gently to them that we were about to study a book whose first word was ‘Noël’. The novel in question was Azouz Begag’s Béni ou le Paradis Privé, which tells the story of boy who is born in Lyon to Algerian parents. The opening sees the boy talk in a jovial manner about his experiences of being from a Muslim family in France in the weeks before Christmas. As part of this revolves around the boy wanting his parents to get a Christmas tree, I decided to deliver the first class about the novel with a miniature Christmas tree and Father Christmas on the desk at the front of the classroom. It was still November, but I think my students let me get away with it.

Whatever you are doing to mark Christmas this year, and even if you’re not, I’d like to wish everyone reading this a great end to 2014 and a fantastic 2015.

I’ve written this post as part of the Multicultural Kid Blogs series ‘Christmas in Different Lands’. Click on this link if you would like to read more posts by parent bloggers about Christmas around the world.

What did you think of this blog post and what did you and your family enjoy most about Christmas?  Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

I’ve added this post to the following parent blogger link-ups:

19 thoughts from my 19th month as a parent

It’s time for another monthly round-up about getting used to being a parent. This month, I talk about Skype, selfies and sledging…

1. Our son has been getting quite affectionate over the last month. He recently kissed the screen when saying goodbye to granny and grandad on Skype…

2. …and he’s also taken to grabbing people’s legs and saying ‘cuddles’.

3. Our son recently took his first ‘selfie’ (see below).

4. In order to try to improve the quality of his selfies, I’ve been giving our son a few tips…

5. ‘Monkey’ / ‘Mwnci’ has become one of the first animals that our son can say. I’m quite pleased he’s chosen one that sounds very similar in English and Welsh. He also does quite a good monkey impression.

6. Our son has been perfecting his ‘family fist pump’ technique in the last week. I was going to post a picture or video here, but the first rule of our family fist pump is that you don’t talk about our family fist pump.

7. Our son may no longer be a little baby, but we still have this balloon (see below) that one of his grannies bought for him when he was a day old.

8. For some time, it’s been almost impossible to try to eat an orange within the sight of our son without him coming over and insisting on having at least half. Now, he seems able to sniff oranges when they’re in our ‘going out’ bag..

9. Our son used to be quite scared by the hoover but now is quite excited by it. The line ‘let’s go downstairs, we’re going to do some hoovering’ has been used to coax him towards the living room recently.

10. My telling of dad jokes has resulted in a change to my official work address…

11. Toothbrushes and spoons generally don’t look alike to most people, but our son recently tried to use his toothbrush in order to eat porridge.

12. Our son’s recently been walking round the kitchen holding up a saucepan lid to his ear and saying ‘hello’. Perhaps it’s time to explain how phones work.

13. Our son’s enthusiasm for gardening has continued recently and we’ve thankfully managed to prevent him from trying to water the chickens again.

14. Having an 18 month old son means not staying up to watch the football highlights on Saturday night’s ‘Match of the Day’ but knowing I’ll wake in time for Sunday morning repeat.

15. I have been trying to get more exercise recently. Last weekend, I went out for a cycle and chased our son round two different soft play centres. I still feel that soft play centres often do a better job of tiring out children than parents.

16. Eating with chopsticks can be challenging for a toddler, but nowhere near as challenging as trying to drink a glass of water using chopsticks…

17. While I was writing this post, our son was walking round the living room with a pan from the kitchen. This has got me thinking: when is it OK to ask your kids to start cooking dinner at least once a week? 🙂

18. Our son had his first trip in a sledge this month. He was dragged around the living room in it by grandad and enjoyed it immensely.

19. When our son had a slight cold recently, we decided that he could still go to the play park but would have to dress up as a fisherman.

What do you think of this post and what do you remember from your first two years as a parent? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

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Tales of a bilingual toddler

As our son is only 18 months old, he hasn’t yet given me much feedback on how he thinks I’m doing as a bilingual parent. Instead, I thought I’d write this post about how things have been going so far. I talked about the reasons why my wife and I are bringing up our son bilingually in one of the first posts on this blog and I’ve also described my experiences on Olga Centeno’s fantasic podcast Bilingual Kids Rock.

Welsh is my third language and one that I only started to learn in 2007 when I moved to Wales to start a job as a lecturer in French at Bangor University. By the time our son was on his way, I was already using Welsh regularly in and out of work. However, it did feel odd when I started to speaking Welsh to our son when he was just a bump and also when he was born just over a year and a half ago.

I’ve sometimes wondered how bringing him up using my third language will affect his language development, especially as my wife (who speaks English to him) spends more time with our son than I do due our working arrangements. However, we are working as a team in order to bring him up bilingually. Indeed, my wife went to a parent and baby Welsh clash where she learned lots of Welsh language nursery rhymes when our son was only a few months old. We’ve also taken in turns to take him to ‘Swn a Sbri’ (meaning ‘Sound and Fun’) sessions in local libraries where he has learned more songs in Welsh and met other babies.

For a lot of the last 18 months, I’ve wondered what impact the Welsh I’ve been speaking with our son has been having. Most of his first few words were in English, although he did quickly learn to say ‘mwy’ (meaning ‘more’) when he wanted more food, which perhaps points towards what he saw as one of his communication priorities. At times, I did wonder if I was doing enough to expose our son to sufficient Welsh. I’ve been trying to address this recently by reading him story books in Welsh at bed time and he’s able to respond to questions like ‘Wyt ti eisiau darllen stori?’ (‘do you want to read a story?’) by wandering over to his pile of toys and picking out a book.

When I was taking our son to the play park recently, I also noticed that he often seems to know when someone is asking a question. He is able to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in English, and also ‘ie’ and ‘na’ in Welsh. This is a good place to be at, although it also means that there are several dozen other words for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in Welsh that he still has to learn as these depend on the types of structures and tenses used in questions. This is something that took me a while to get my head round as an adult learner of the language, so I’m hoping that our son will somehow manage to pick it up naturally.

Realising that our son understands some simple questions in Welsh is fun as well as quite satisfying. He can currently do a variety of different animal sounds when we ask him what noise certain animals make in either Welsh or English. He seems to particularly enjoy making pig and snake noises, but needs to more clearly differentiate between the sounds made by sheep and lions.

Our son’s also at a fun stage where he sometimes finds a word that he likes and walks around repeating it. I particularly like it when I come in from work and hear him repeatedly say ‘daddy, daddy, daddy’. When I was in the garden picking apples recently, he spontaneously started saying ‘apple’ several times without me having said the word. Before long, I managed to get him to say ‘afal’ (the Welsh equivalent). Just last week, I asked him ‘wyt ti eisiau cael bath?’ (‘do you want to have a bath?’) and mimicked the response ‘oes plis, tad’ (yes please, dad) as he enthusiastically started climbing the stairs. Almost instantly, he said back ‘oes, tad, plis’ (‘yes, dad, please’).

As our son progresses along the language learning path, I’m also going to have to learn some new tricks to help him out. At the moment, singing ‘Old MacDonald had a farm’ is often a good way of getting him to stop crying when he’s tired or upset. However, I currently only know how to sing this song in English. When my wife and I are in the car, it feels like it’d be kind of wrong to follow our ‘one parent one language’ (OPOL) approach to the extent that I’d only join in with the animal sounds that are the same in Welsh and English. However, I am now on a mission to learn the Welsh version of this song. I know the Welsh version of ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ but unfortunately my repertoire of Welsh language nursery rhymes is pretty limited.

Perhaps it’s time to start listening to one our many Welsh language nursery rhyme CDs on the bus on the way to work. I’ll just have to hope that I don’t end up singing out loud, although an early morning nursery rhyme sing along could help to lighten the atmosphere on our often crowded local buses as they wind their way towards Bangor.

Are you bringing up your kids bilingually? How important do you think it is to speak different languages? Please feel free to share your views and experiences in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

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Will our son like curry?

This is a big question and not just because it’s currently National Curry Week here in the UK. In fact, it’s a question that I’d put it in the same category as ‘will our son like haggis?’. For some time, I have looked forward to being able to share my favourite sort of food with our son.

About a year ago, I tweeted ‘been enjoying watching our 6 month old son starting to eat solids – it’s mainly baby rice at the moment, hope we’ll soon be able to give him baby curry’. Within minutes, someone who saw my tweet decided to tweet back with a link to a recipe for vegetable and coconut curry that is suitable for babies as it’s not too spicy. As I haven’t yet made this curry for my son, the fact that it’s National Curry Week here in the UK from 13-19th October seems a good reason to put that right.

Whilst a lot of people are wary about feeding spicy food to babies and toddlers, it seems that this can vary from one culture to another. I remember my mum telling me about a Sri Lankan friend who had little hesitation in feeding spicy dishes to her baby son. So far, our son has had a few mild curries and seems to quite like them. We’ve tried baby led weaning with him, and it’s generally worked fairly well.

The first time I remember having a curry was when I went to an Indian restaurant in St. Andrews (Scotland) with my parents when I was about ten. I loved the flavours of the spices and have been a big fan of curry ever since then. In fact, I have often planned journeys around trips to curry restaurants. From 2002 to 2004, I taught English at a university in Lille (France) and would head back to Leeds five or six times a year as I was registered for a Masters degree at the university there. I would get the Eurostar from Paris to London and make sure that I’d have enough time to have a curry at a fantastic restaurant near Euston station before getting the train up to Leeds.

I’d go as far as saying that the number and quality of Indian restaurants and sweet shops on Drummond Street makes it one of my favourite streets in London. As a vegetarian, I love the fact that there are at least half a dozen Indian vegetarian restaurants on the same street. What is more, several of them do amazing lunch time buffets where it is possible to sample a fantastic range of starters, main courses and desserts. I have sometimes thought that their ‘eat as much as you like’ format could end up making them go bankrupt and me gain a serious amount of weight.

That said, going out for a curry has always been something that I’ve seen as a bit of a treat. We’re lucky to have a really good Indian takeaway called the Sittar in the village where we live. I heard a rumour that they’re going to set up a smaller branch in the village that offers childcare as well as tasty food. Apparently, they’re going to call it the Baby Sittar.

I’d love to visit India one day and sample the cuisine in the land where it originates. There are doubtless various questions one can raise about the ‘authenticity’ of Indian food that is served up in countries such as the UK. In addition to the fact that a lot of what are generally called ‘Indian’ restaurants are run by Bangladeshis or Pakistanis, it may well be the case that the foods served up in some establishments are created in part to appeal to a British palate, However, this issue doesn’t really bother me. I am, after all, a Scotsman who eats vegetarian haggis rather than the traditional meat haggis and who serves this form of the national dish in burger form, in cannelloni or with couscous.

I’ve noticed that curries can often taste slightly different depending on where you are in the world. I haven’t noticed much difference between Indian food that is served in the UK and the US, but it’s not the same story in France or Spain. In France, curries that would be described as mild in the UK are often listed as medium spicy on restaurant menus. When I was in an Indian restaurant in Barcelona, I remember the waiter asking if I wanted the curry I’d ordered to be ‘medium British’ or ‘medium Spanish’.

Foods with an Indian twist form an important part of what we eat on special occasions, and massala nut roast with spicy tomato gravy is definitely one of my favourite vegetarian Christmas meals. It’s particularly good when served with Brussel sprouts that are stir fried with chilli and paneer (and Indian form of cheese). As our son grows up, I hope he’ll come to share our love of Indian food.

Do you have any particular foods that you like to eat as a family? Are there any events where you live where people celebrate a particular sort of food? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

I’ve added this post to the following parenting blog link-ups:

Happy International Babywearing Week!

Last year, we marked International Babywearing Week by visiting the nearby village of Sling with our son in a sling. A year on, we’re still carrying our now 18 month old son in a variety of different sorts of slings and we now live several miles closer to the village of Sling after a recent house move.

I’ve found myself blogging about babywearing several times over the last year, which reflects the fact that slings have come to be a lot more than simply a sort of ‘hands-free kit’ for carrying our son. As I’ve said here before, they have really helped me to bond with my son and helped to me to comfort him and get him to sleep on several occasions.

Here’s a look back at my own babywearing highlights of the last year:

An obvious place to start is our visit to the village of Sling to mark last year’s International Babywearing Week. To add an international dimension, I also discussed babywearing around the world thanks to the input of a great range of parent bloggers who are part of the Multicultural Kid Blogs group.

Looking back a year on, I cannot believe how much our son has grown since the photo on the left was taken. We still carry him in slings from time to time, but this now officially counts as weight training.

One of the places where I’ve often taken our son in a sling is our local supermarket and I wrote about this in a post earlier this year called Shopping with our son in a sling. It may seem like a mundane weekly activity, but it has also become a semi-regular weekend father and son bonding activity which allows my wife to take a break while we head out on a little expedition. I’m not sure if my parents took me shopping in a sling when I was a baby – the photo on the left seems to suggest that they tried to dress me in handknitted clothes that went with the shopping trolley.

Over the last year, I’ve also enjoyed sharing experiences of babywearing with fellow members of Sling Dads UK, a group that promotes babywearing among fathers.They also organized a Sling Dads Family Camp this summer, which led to me writing a post about Camping with a toddler. This post is the most popular one that I’ve written on this blog so far.

Over the last year, babywearing has really developed from being a way of getting out and about with our baby son to one which has provided a great form of bonding with him as he grows older and more aware of the world around him. Slings are a crucial tool when it comes to getting him to sleep in the evening when my wife is out. Finally figuring out how to get our sleeping son out of a sling and into his bed without waking him was one of my proud parenting moments. Most people probably manage to this before their child is over a year old, but I certainly wasn’t one of them.

I have at times wondered where my love of babywearing has come from. In some ways, it’s definitely due to my wife being very keen on slings. However, a photo that I discovered at my parents’ house when preparing a blog post entitled Like father like son suggests that the true answer may be that it’s genetic. As the photo below shows, my dad also carried me in a baby carrier back in the late 70s and early 80s. As I’m fast asleep in the picture, it looks like I quite enjoyed it!

What do you think of babywearing and is it popular where you live? Have you ever carried your children in a sling and did your parents use baby carriers when you were young? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

I’ve added this post to the following parent blogger link-ups:

18 thoughts from my 18th month as a parent

Muppets, moving house and making animal noises. Read about all these and more in my latest monthly collection of thoughts about parenthood.

1. I may have been singing too many Muppets songs to our 16 month old son. His answer to ‘what does the cat say?’ recently was ‘mahna mahna’.

2. Despite his confusion about what cats say, our son has been getting quite good at doing animal sounds this month. His sheep and lion sounds are a bit similar but he’s getting really good at doing ‘moo’ sounds despite the relative lack of cows in our area.

3. I’m not sure if our son wants to follow in my footsteps but it certainly looks like he wants to walk in my shoes (see picture below).

4. Our son recently helped to unpack a whole bag of shopping. I’d put in on the floor while I opened the fridge door and he then handed me all the items one after another without me even asking. I hope that this is a sign of things to come!

5. Helping to wash the dishes is another thing that our son did this month. He managed to combine this with helping to wash the kitchen floor at the same time.

6. Our son’s helpfulness this month has also included playing a role in organizing my new office.

7. Our son’s gradually starting to understand technology although he does sometimes put the television remote control to his ear and say ‘hello’…

8. …and he also seems to occasionally confuse cutlery and technology. He recently put a plastic fork to his ear and said ‘hello’.

9. Our son has been enjoying feeding corn to our chickens recently. He’s also occasionally tried to feed them clothes pegs recently, but they’ve turned their beaks up at them.

10. In the week before we moved house, our son started making chicken noises in the kitchen while he was sitting in his high chair. He’d noticed one of the chickens peering in the window and seemed like he was trying to say hello. I like this progress towards multilingualism.

11. I recently carried out a parenting experiment to see whether an episode of Raa Raa The Noisy Little Lion or coverage of the live televised debate on Scottish independence would get our toddler son to sleep. Two episodes of Raa Raa weren’t enough, but he was fast asleep after half an hour of the independence debate.

12. Our son took a very ‘hands on’ approach to helping to pack boxes before we moved house (see picture below). I recently wrote a blog post about this entitled Moving house with a toddler.

13. This month, I have learned that the way to get our son out of the bath without him crying is to let the water out of the bath and then lift him out.

14. When I stood on one leg at a bank machine, our son looked a bit puzzled. I tried to explain to him that I was checking my balance.

15. Our son is getting much better at steering his toddle truck. A few months ago in our old house, he’d just push it forward and cry when he bumped into something and couldn’t push it any more. He’d then wait for someone to come and turn the toddler truck around so he could push it some more.

16. Our son decided to get up at 7am to watch coverage of the Scottish Indepedence Referendum results with me. I’m glad to see him taking an interest in politics at such a young age.

17. On way home after three days at a conference, I discovered one of our son’s little red socks in my trouser pocket.

18. It was a lot easier when I was writing posts such as ‘7 thoughts from my 7th month as a parent’ 🙂 Anyway, I’ll see if I can keep going with these posts until our son turns two.

What do you think of this post and what do you remember from your first year and a half as a parent? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

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13 thoughts from my 13th month as a parent

14 thoughts from my 14th month as a parent

15 thoughts from my 15th month as a parent

16 thoughts from my 16th month as a parent

17 thoughts from my 17th month as a parent

Baby’s first year in 12 photos

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Being a Scottish Dad

On 18th September 2014, could be an historic day for Scotland as the country’s inhabitants are today voting in a referendum that could result in Scotland becoming independent from the United Kingdom. As a Scot who now lives in Wales, I’ve been asked about how this vote will affect by relationship with the country in which I was born and brought up. Indeed, I’ve been interviewed about this matter in Welsh on Radio Cymru and on television channel S4C.

Ultimately, I don’t think that the result of the referendum will have a major impact on how I see Scotland. It will always be the country where I was born and brought up and I am sure that I’ll always enjoy returning there. As I have lived outside of Scotland since 1998 and got married and become a dad in Wales, our son is likely to have a very different relationship with Scotland to the one I have. To get a flavour of what Scotland means to me as a parent, here are some blog posts that I have written about being from Scotland and sharing Scottish culture with our son:

First family trip to Scotland This summer, we went to Scotland as a family for the first time. In this post, I explain what it was liked visiting places that had been part of my own childhood.

Will our son like haggis? Read this post to find out about vegetarian haggis and what it means to me as a Scot living outside of Wales and what it symbolizes.

A Scottish dad’s thoughts about St. Andrew’s Day I wrote this post to coincide with St. Andrew’s Day (30th November) last year and discuss my own relationship with haggis.

Seamus Heaney, haggis and Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau Shortly after the death of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, I wrote this post in which I discussed having Irish roots, growing up

Have you ever been to Scotland? What sorts of traditions from your childhood do you try to share with your kids? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

I’ve added this post to the following parenting blog link-ups:

Moving house with a toddler

Due to moving house, I’ve taken a bit of a break from blogging recently. Now that we’ve been in our new place for just over two weeks, we’re feeling settled in our new abode even if we haven’t quite finished the unpacking yet. Our son seems to be enjoying having a bit more space inside and out in which to run around and appears to be fascinated by our garden shed.

In years to come, I’m not sure what – if anything – our son’s going to remember of the house that we recently moved out of. It’ll always  be a special place for my wife and me as it’s where we got engaged and also the place we took our son home to after he left hospital. It may well be that our son will only really become familiar with our old house through photos that we show him in coming years rather than memories of what it was like.

We’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks surrounded by boxes. First of all, we spent a lot of time packing things up at our house and then we had to unpack them all at our new house. Our son seemed to like playing in the boxes and even played a small role in helping with the packing. Preparing for the move was made a lot easier thanks to several of our friends looking after our son or taking him out while we got on with tidying up our old house.

Think we’ve packed everything, but where’s our son gone?

Our son can be quite helpful around the house at times and often likes nothing more than to walk around with a little brush and sweep the floor. As the picture below shows, he’s also been kind enough to help me tidy my office as well recently.

One of the best things about being in a new house is having more space for our son to get his toys out. At our last place, the living room space could feel quite small when he had his ball pool out. Now, we can keep the ball pool out in our living room and not worry about it getting in the way. That said, he has recently been spending a bit of time walking around our new living room with a measuring tape as if he has some grand plans to make a few changes.

It’s also great to have larger garden where our son is able to run around and have fun in the open air. He’s recently had a lot of fun feeding corn to our two chickens Dorothy and Myfanwy. Until recently, he’d normally drop the corn just outside the chicken run but just this weekend he’s actually managed to start throwing the corn into the run. Our two chickens are grateful for this improved standard of catering provision.

For the first few nights after we moved, our son seemed to sleep less well than normal. This involved a triple whammy of not going to bed as early as normal, waking up during the night and getting up really early. Part of this might have been due to teething or having recently caught chicken pox (…not sure whether Dorothy or Myfanwy is to blame). He’s now sleeping a lot more and seems to be quite happy despite having chicken pox. We’ve got our fingers crossed that everything will be back to normal soon as we get used to life in our new house.

Have you ever moved house with your kids? Do you remember moving house when you were a child? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

I’ve added this post to the following parent blogger link-ups where you can read lots of other posts about parenting:

17 thoughts from my 17th month as a parent

It’s time for another monthly list of thoughts about parenthood. This month’s compilation covers topics such as food, children’s television and monkey impressions.

1. Our son is currently conducting an experiment. He’s trying to find out how many blueberries he needs to eat before he turns into a blueberry himself.

2. Today I got slightly annoyed while watching a television programme for kids as a shape singing ‘I am a rectangle’ was clearly a cuboid. I tried to explain this to our son, but I’m not sure if he understood.

3. I think it’ll probably be a few years before my son and I have problems telling our shoes apart.

4. 16 month old son has been walking around front room touching his nose and going ‘beep’ recently.

5. My son and I recently managed to keep ourselves entertained for about 20 minutes just by throwing a green sock at each other. It was a very enjoyable 20 minutes.

6. Our son’s been getting to know our two chickens a bit better recently and enjoys collecting the eggs from the chicken house (see picture below).

7. I think our son had even more fun running around a furniture shop recently than he did last time we took him to a soft play centre. I think we’ve now discovered a new local free outing option for families for toddlers. Local parents – let’s try to not all go to the same shop at the same time, OK? 🙂

8. Despite being 17 months old, our son still hasn’t worked out that it’s best not to try to eat porridge using his hands.

9. I really don’t want to be an overly competitive dad but I recently convincingly beat a five year old in a game of ‘Guess Who’ despite trying my best to lose.

10. Our son has a lot of bath toys, but his favourite one at the moment is a light blue plastic spoon.

11. We’ve cut our son’s fringe twice but he hasn’t had a proper haircut yet and his hair is getting quite long at the back. Given that he has quite a few tie-dyed baby grows, he could soon end up looking like an early 1990s Andre Agassi.

12. One of our son’s favourite things at the moment is climbing up steps. Sometimes he puts on his frog trousers and hops all the way from the bottom step to the top step.

13. Our son is getting good at copying animal noises and I had a real proud dad moment when he copied my chimpanzee impression.

14. Working at home is a lot harder than it used to be now that our son is getting so active. His new tactic is to start putting his toys on the table next to me when I’m busily working away. He recently tried to distract me with a knitted dinosaur while I was in the middle of marking a dissertation.

15. I have now decided to put 50p in our son’s money box any time that I swear while he is within earshot. I hope that this doesn’t make him rich and that he doesn’t try to get me to swear in order to receive more money from me.

16. Our son recently got really excited about a new dustpan and brush that we bought. Goodness knows what he’ll do if we get a new hoover.

17. It’s not just the dustpan and brush that our son’s fascinated by, it’s also our paintbrush and paint rollers. We’re going to be painting the front of our house soon, so maybe he’ll help us out 🙂

What do you mean I’m too young to be allowed to help paint the house?

What do you think of this post and what do you remember from your first year and a half as a parent? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

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I’ve added this post to the following parent blogger link-ups, check them out to see a range of posts by fellow parent bloggers: