Like father, like son

I was recently looking through some pictures of myself as a baby and was struck by some of the similar things that I did as a baby and that our son has done in his first fifteen months. Here are a few examples…

I’ve talked about slings in some posts on this blog, partly because we live near a village called Sling and partly because going round the supermarket with my son in a sling has become an unexpected father and son bonding activity. As it happens, I was a baby who was carried around in a baby carrier by my dad over thirty years ago…

 

 

Another thing that I seem to have copied from my dad is wearing matching father and son stripey t-shirts. The one on the left was taken in Scotland in the early 1980s and the one on the right in Wales last year…

 

 

Our son also seems to be following in my footsteps by developing an early interest in reading, or at least pulling books off bookshelves…

 

 

…and he seems also to have developed my love of sand and sandpits.

 

As I mentioned in a recent post, our son has tried to water our chickens while walking around our back garden with a watering can. Judging by the picture below on the left, it looks like my parents took steps to make sure I didn’t get too close to chickens whether or not I was carrying a watering can!

 

 

Finally, it seems like my son and I also share a love of swings. Here’s a photo of baby, daddy and granny in a play park…

 

What did you think of this blog post? Do your kids do things that you used to like doing when you were younger? 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+.

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3 Thoughts about Nappies: changing, multi-tasking and motor racing

*For the benefit of North American readers, ‘nappies’ are what us folk from over the pond called ‘diapers’.

Just as I was writing my last post about images of dads and men on television, these types of images of were making the news in the United States. Nappy maker Clorox pulled an advertisement that was seen as insulting to dads and that had provoked considerable anger among members of the Dad bloggers group, as has been described on the website of the Good Men Project. Armin Brott, who runs the Mr. Dad blog, and has written many books on parenting was particularly critical of Clorox. He responded to the Clorox ad ‘6 Mistakes New Dads Make’ with a post entitled 7 Mistakes Clorox Made in Taking a Swipe at New Dads. Rather than wade into the debate surrounding the controversial ad itself, I thought that I would instead take a more personal and slightly light-hearted look at the subject of nappies with a post entitled 3 Thoughts about Nappies. At the moment, I am intending to make ‘3 Thoughts about…’ a regular midweek feature on this blog. Anyway, here goes with my three thoughts about nappies…

1. Beware of the hot air dryer.

On a recent trip to a cafe, I was tasked with finding nappy changing facilities and changing our son’s nappy. The nappy changing facilities were cunningly hidden in the disabled toilet, and the sign on the door offered no clues to this. Our son started crying fairly soon after I put him down on the changing mat so I felt under pressure to carry out a quick and efficient nappy change. I was about to congratulate myself on managing to do this in new and somewhat cramped surroundings, especially as our son stopped crying fairly soon after I’d put him in a new nappy. However, after washing my hands I committed what I now realise to be a cardinal sin. I pushed the button on the hot air dryer, which was pretty close to the nappy change table. Instantly I saw a look of terror on his face. He became still and looked stunned before he started to cry loudly. I now know not to use the hot air dryer in a nappy change room, especially if it is close to the changing table.

2. Nappy changing improves multi-tasking skills.

At first it seemed like a bit of a complicated task: a baby, a mat, old nappy, new nappy, cotton wool, wet wipes, water, new clothes close at hand, something to put old nappy in… However, I feel that having now changed quite a few nappies it is a lot quicker and easier and my multi-tasking abilities have improved. With all the bits and bobs that form part of re-usable nappies (inners, outers and liners), they’re particularly good for honing multi-tasking skills.

 

3. How do members of motor racing pit teams change nappies?

With trying to use all the various bits and bobs in order to quickly change a nappy as quickly and efficiently as possible, it struck me that changing a nappy is in many ways a bit like when a car comes into the pit lane for refuelling. In the pit lane, a team of mechanics can often re-fuel a car and change all its wheels in under ten seconds. But how quickly could they change a baby’s nappy? Would they use the same equipment? I hope that the answer to the second question is no! 🙂 I did have a silly vision a while back of motor racing drivers ringing their pit team any time their baby’s nappy needed changing and then each member of the team turning up on their doorstep more or less instantly turning up on their doorstep, each armed with a different thing that’s involved in the nappy changing process before they all set about the task and complete it in under ten seconds. It was quite a vision. If Formula 1 racing teams actually do this, I’d love to know what their record nappy change time is.

I’ve set up a Facebook page for this blog and am also tweeting about at it at @j_ervine. Feel free to like and follow in order to stay up-to-date with this blog and remember that you can also subscribe to posts via e-mail using the link on the right. In the next week I’ll be doing a post about paternity leave and maternity leave.

Read all about it! Dad books and preparing for fatherhood

In the run-up to the birth of our son, my wife and I probably ended up reading more books on pregnancy, childbirth and babies than most. I think that my job as a university lecturer may have something to do with it and why I wanted to feel prepared. I remember coming across a quote once that ‘there’s no crisis to which academics will not respond by organising a conference’. I heard that at a conference, a conference organised by academics. It was actually a conference about a crisis anyway and I think that we saw pregnancy, childbirth and becoming parents as an exciting challenge more than anything else.

Sometimes I found myself asking why there were books about pregnancy especially for men and what it was that they did that ‘traditional’ pregnancy books did not. Whilst a lot ‘traditional’ books on pregnancy doubtlessly provide a lot of useful information about what sorts of things occur during labour and child birth, a lot of them are written in a way that basically tells women what to expect and they tend to focus on recounting women’s stories of their experiences and feelings. All this is in many ways understandable seeing as it is women who carry the baby and give birth to it. However, books in which there is a token chapter telling men what to expect or focusing on the role of men do little to encourage men to feel that they are more than an ‘add-on’ or a spare wheel in the whole process. In other words, this type of pregnancy book does little to empower men or encourage them to take an active role in parenting. I say parenting as I feel that the process of being a parent involves caring for the baby and its mother during the nine months of pregnancy and not just when the baby is born.

When I did a search online for books about parenting that were written specifically for men, I was pleased to find that there were quite a few to choose from. Just as there are different sorts of men and fathers, there were also different sorts of books. I deliberately avoided those that seemed to be written in a lad’s mag style that began by telling the reader of the need to stop sitting on the sofa drinking beer and watching football as there was some real work to be done. I do like sitting on the sofa at times and certainly watching a bit of football, but I found the tone of this type of book a bit condescending and almost insulting. Ultimately, I ended up buying and reading through two books that I felt did an excellent job of helping to let expectant fathers know what to expect.

The two books in question were Pregnancy for Men by Mark Woods and The Expectant Dad’s Survival Guide by Rob Kemp. Being able to download a free sample of these books to an e-reader before buying was very useful as I was able to tell whether or not they seemed just right. Both books did a good job of providing practical advice in an engaging and readable manner and recounting men’s experiences of different stages of pregnancy and becoming a dad.

I also read some books about slightly more specific or specialised aspects of pregnancy and bringing up children such as The Father’s Home Birth Handbook by Leah Hazard and Babynomics: money saving tips for savvy parents by Madeline Thomas. In the course of the next few weeks and months, I will try to provide more detailed reviews of some these books on this blog. I wouldn’t say that reading so many books is essential but at least trying to read one fairly general book about becoming a father is certainly a good step towards getting an idea of what to expect. Oh, and it means that you won’t find lots and lots of books cluttering things up as you attempt to de-clutter in preparation for your new arrival. For a while, we kept our pregnancy books on a sort of shelf underneath the cot that we had bought for our baby. The number of books meant that it became somewhat hard to move the cot and we ended up deciding that it would probably be easier to move the books somewhere else before we started piling them into the main part of the cot and considering making a space on a bookshelf for our baby.