watch my baby blossom on parental leave in sweden

My son walked down a subway platform on Saturday waving to everyone and saying, “Bye bye!”

This was charming.  This was cute.  This was totally unexpected.

Baby B has so far been a shy child, the child who does not want the stuffed monkey to say hello to him at song time at open preschool.

Then he walked and found freedom.  Then he got really sick.  Then he finally got better.  And now he is blossoming.

At least in public.  For we have seen the wild and crazy Baby B from the beginning.

But this is my point.  I am on paternity leave.  So I knew that private Baby B minute-by-minute, the way he goes from screams to laughs and back in about five seconds.  And I have been there for all those times he turned away from the monkey at song time.

And now I was there when he walked down the subway platform saying “Bye-bye” to strangers.

I can’t describe how it is different that I am the home parent.  I would never ever ever in a million years say that I was not as close to his big sister when she was this age (I was off with her when she was older).  I would never say that I am closer to my son than any other father is to his kids.

But still … it is special to be around this boy 24 hours a day and hold his hand while he comes into his toddler own.

the zen of paternity leave

I see that many parents get bored on parental leave.  All that talking to toddlers.  All the simple play, wiping food off faces, changing diapers.

I get that.  I get bored.

But it also quiets my mind.  I go a little Zen – or Mr. Miyagi from Karate Kid, if you want.

Wax on, wax off.

I wrote about this last year, about the sandbox, but that was a summer thing.  This is an everyday thing.

All that repetitive motion – rolling the ball, closing and opening the pop up toy, lifting the baby off the dining room table, singing the same Swedish nursery rhymes over and over and over at open preschool.

And, again, the sandbox, new in spring, with wet sand just below the surface cluttered with the leaves and twigs of fall and winter.  The rake.  The shovel.  The immediate smashing of every sand castle you build.

Impermanence.

I just finished a book called Myth and Ritual in Christianity by Alan Watts (yes, I read almost oddly serious books in Daddyland – that is probably to balance all that baby time that I am in the middle of romanticizing.  The thought of reading, say, Dan Brown right now is unthinkable, and I cannot watch bad TV either.)  He was a Buddhist writing about myth in Christianity, so don’t draw any conclusions one way or another.

I am tired so I lost the exact quote, but he writes about imagery of God as a hand writing across space and time with the words erased immediately, or a spark on a similar path.

And I see that in my life with my kids, every giggle and “Ta Da!” from the top of the dining room table.  I feel that spark because I am home and with them and life has slowed down, and it does not matter that the spark moves on.

OK, it does matter.  I am not a Buddhist.  But, still, I get the point, and it is a beautiful one.

designed to provoke jealousy about my paternity leave

This is just a brief scene, meant to drive home how very cool paternity leave is and why everyone should be fighting for it wherever they live.

Today I cleaned our balcony while my 14-month-old son played with dry leaves and splashed in a flower pot filled with melted snow.

Today we walked to an empty playground, and he made me sing Itsy Bitsy Spider about 10 times.

Today he started pulling on his sweatshirt like a macho boxer, the first time he has demanded to take off clothes.

Today I chased my son for the first time, the little guy toddling away and howling with laughter.

Today he rode a seesaw for the first time.

Today his older sister started tickling him on the walk home from her daycare.  He giggled for more than a minute.

Today I read three New Yorker articles sitting in the sand and the sun.

Today was a good day in Daddyland.

If you don’t respond to that list, that’s fine.

Have a nice day at work.

lacking homemaking skills in Daddyland

I am a competent home parent.  We have a good morning routine.  E leaves for school and an hour later both kids are fed, dressed and we are on the way to daycare.

This morning I even had a zen moment about crayons.  Baby B eats them.  I get frustrated.  But this morning I sat with both kids and we drew with crayons and I helped him draw and just kept taking the crayons from his mouth – slowing down to his pace.

But I am a short-termer, a visitor to Daddyland.  And this became apparent this morning.  Holding a green crayon, I remembered that NK’s rain overalls needed sewing.  I ran around looking for a needle and thread.  Took too long.  Then I started sewing – with the toddler’s help.  Sewing into rain overalls is hard – three layers of tough material.  I was breaking needles, bleeding from my thumb, all with a three-year-old hanging over me.

During this time, the baby got into a bowl of oatmeal filled with blueberries.  He dumped them all over NK’s chair and the floor … and half our clean laundry.  Meanwhile, the needle got stuck and I had to break the string but left no room to tie a final knot.  I faked it, while cleaning oatmeal off the couch, as the baby had apparently hidden some in a secret pocket just to smear on the clear other side of the room.

Then it was over.  We got ready.  We got to daycare 15 minutes late.  The baby sleeps.

No big deal, except that I realized that I do not know how to sew tough material.  I do not really know what to do with blueberry stains on white clothes.  I do not know the best way to clean a couch.

I do not consider this a question of gender, by the way.  I assume I would know these things if I was home full-time.

But I am not.

So back to the crayons, I am going be zen, and let it go …

the shifting boundaries of Daddyland

Daddyland has different boundaries.  Both external and internal.

In the physical world, the geography of Daddyland is bounded by the open preschool, the parks, the sand box, the forest, the mall, the steps.  It is bounded by naps and toddler pick up and the mass transit system.   With a baby who cannot walk, it means staying inside and close enough to home for meals and sleep, because you may think you are going to explore but you do not.  You want an open preschool, with more toys than your tiny apartment and cheap coffee and a few smiles and a teacher with a guitar in tune for singing.

But moving to Daddyland also pushes the boundaries of each father, to interact with his kids in a different, more minute to minute, more responsible, more caregiving way.

It challenges the boundaries of the mother too, forced to relinquish some control, though also given a freedom.

Daddyland pushes the boundaries of wider society, of open preschool teachers faced with dads, of employers who suddenly have fathers and mothers to juggle, of bystanders and grandparents who must accept the fathers pushing strollers, the sons taking time off, the daughters leaving babies with seemingly incompetent men.

In general, life in Daddyland pushes boundaries in a good direction, an equal direction, teaches men to pack the bags, keeps their eyes on the air in the stroller wheels, on whether we need extra clothes at dagis, on the toddler’s asthma medicine.

Right now, though, I get the feeling many of these guys are playing by the rules of a world they don’t quite own.  They adjust their life to what is expected of them – competently as it turns out – but there is still something subtly stiff (??) about the toys they play with or the lunches they serve.

But the boundaries are still shifting in Daddyland.  It’s a new country, after all.

a voice mail from baby is a window into Daddyland

I got a little outside perspective on my life in Daddyland the other day – from myself.

See, this life on paternity leave is so different from my alternative American lives, and I think it is so important, and I write about it so much here, and I am trying to figure out a magazine pitch and maybe book proposal.  So I play up the drama and the difference.

Then I got a voice mail on my mobile phone.  No one ever leaves me voice mail.

It was from us.  Baby B had called my phone when playing with the home phone.  With our lousy coverage, my phone never rang.

So I listened to a couple minutes of life in Daddyland and learned two things:  how different my life is now from when I work, and how slow life with baby can be.  And I also understand why I stare a little blankly when people tell me I should be writing a book proposal.  How do you get beyond page 3?

Here goes:

Daddy:  Hey, good job!

Silence.  Rustling.

Daddy:  Hey!

Silence.

Daddy:  What’s that?  Do I have a sock on my nose?

Crying.

Daddy:  Ohhhhh, what’s wrong my buddy.

Silence.  Clicking.  Rustling.

Daddy and Baby B both laugh.

Silence.  Clicking.  Shuffling.

The End.

the swedish soul is a song – so the expat dad sings too

Sweden is singing, and life with small children in Sweden is a life of song.

There is a reason that so many Swedes make it internationally – from ABBA to the Cardigans to Robyn to the Hives to name just a few (and not even getting into producers like Max Martin).  This is a culture of singing – at the feast table on Midsummer Eve, at church (when people go to church), at school, at graduations, at Christmastime (both Lucia and Christmas), at home, with friends (but not in public, no, never in public).

You know that show The Singing Bee?  Sweden has about five of those, Friday nights especially, seemingly one singing show after another – with random guests like politicians and comedians and actors belting out tunes in Swedish and English in beautiful voices.

The most popular summer TV institution?  A sing-a-long show.

At open preschool, there is always a singing time.  There is singing at daycare, singing at the library, singing all over town.  Every Astrid Lindgren story comes with songs – Pippi, Emil, Bullerbyn, the lot.  I know that life with small children in the U.S. also involves much singing – on TV, at preschool, on CDs.  I know.  But Sweden is different, a scale of musicality that Americans cannot match.

Quick.  How many songs do you know by heart, not including Christmas carols?

Swedes know hundreds.  I swear.

Now, I was not a singer.  Yes, there was that 7th grade lunchtime chorus, but, really, my voice cracked from 13 to 28, and I can stay on key but only in my half-octave range.

But there I was belting out Swedish nursery rhymes yesterday at a new open preschool.  I am particularly good at all the versions of Ba Ba Vita Lamm and itsy bitsy spider and the crocodile song and wheels on the bus and a few others.

But I have English speaking children.  What about that?  I am the primary source for all English and American things in their life.  Can they grow up thinking you only sing in Swedish?

Hah!

So on top of all this Swedish singing, I am perpetually singing in English.  We have multiple nursery rhyme books, we have the Dr. Seuss singing book, we got all sorts of kids CDs and I try to learn all the words.  This morning we actually put Dora the Explorer on Spotify – just to hear her sing.

I do not want to think about how many times I sang the 12 Days of Christmas in December.  My daughter still uses “partridge in a pear tree” as a catchphrase.

But then the other day, I heard her singing under her breath as she played with some toy farm animals in her room.  I leaned in.  What was the song?

Mary Had a Little Lamb.  In English.  In tune.

Gloooooooooooria!