Fatherhood² | Henry's Blog

With both Robert and Freddie’s birthdays coming up in the next couple of months, our minds have turned to the sticky subject of birthday parties. Obviously with Freddie it’s a first birthday, so his opinion on how it’s spent is not really top of our priorities – so long as he gets food and a bit of sleep, he’ll be happy.

But with Robert it’s his fourth, and more crucially the first he’s had where he truly understands the concept of both a birthday and a party – especially now that he’s at pre-school, being invited to lots of other birthday parties himself. Until this year, the only parties he’d really been exposed to were those of our friends’ children, which is a fairly small group. But now he’s in a class of almost 30 children, and the ferris wheel of parties has started to crank up…
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As a parent who happens to work in marketing, I often find myself pondering over the way my children are marketed to/at, and torn by what I see. As I quite regularly discuss, both our children’s TV habits are almost entirely limited to Cbeebies (or occasionally the “grown-up” BBC channels, for documentaries and the like) – so their exposure to advertising has been fairly limited. However, in the past few months I’ve witnessed the magic of advertising brilliantly:

Robert is sometimes allowed to watch “Milkshake” on Channel 5 (with shows like Thomas, Peppa Pig and Roary – so nothing overly commercial) and obviously these shows include an (admittedly limited) amount of advertising. Even with this small exposure, Robert will happily wander round the house muttering “Brought to you by Imaginext!” (along with, randomly, “BBC RADIO TWOOOOOO”!) and on a recent trip to Toys R Us he went straight to the toys he’d seen in those ad breaks. He is, as the saying goes, a Marketing Man’s Dream!
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As I sit here on the eve of both Robert and Freddie going in to whole-day care/education, I thought it would be a good time to post the follow-up to my post “A Children’s Book for Ever Life Lesson“. After I published the last post, lots of you were kind enough to suggest books which fit the bill – though I’ve still got a few gaps, so I’d welcome more suggestions!

I’ve not read every one of them, so I’m going to just post the book details as supplied on Amazon – you can make up your own mind! I’ve also credited the people who made the suggestion…
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‘I’m still funny. I’m still creative. I’m still kind of hip. I’m still sane.’ This is the mantra I have been repeating to myself for the past three years. The past three years have seemed long and short at the same time. The day they were born was the best and most stressful day of my life. Their development through these years has lifted my soul to the highest heights and weighed on my mind until I thought it would sink into the deepest depths of worry and frustration. Some folks (me included) never know what feeling two opposite emotions feels like until you have kids.

Not to bore with a long story, but I have to step back in time a bit. I never thought of being a mom that much. To be honest, I was getting used to the idea of having a career and being happy with that. Things changed when I met my husband. I was pretty late to that game in comparison to my friends and colleagues. We were married when I was 31. Then I found out the whole biological clock thing isn’t a myth. It’s real. It sucks, and it will hound the crap out of you until you listen to it.

We started almost two months after our wedding trying to build our little family. We had no reason to think things weren’t going to be easy. We thought that within a few months we would have happy news to share with our families and friends. One year, then almost two years went by and we knew things were not going to fall into place naturally. After lots of unhappy medicines and two rounds of the medical equivalent to a turkey baster, we got the phone call we had been waiting on. I went in the next week for my first ultrasound. One small little bean with a beating heart showed up on that screen. I smiled and knew everything was going to be ok. That was BT…before twins.
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With just over a week to go until Sara returns to work (albeit part time), the day is also approaching when we’ll have to leave Freddie at nursery for the first time. Not only that, but it’ll also be the first time Robert has gone full-time at pre-school – so nerves are definitely running high in our house at the moment, to say the least.

Whilst I’m definitely worried about all three of these changes, I’m well aware that we’re very lucky to only be experiencing most of these for the first time now, almost 4 years in to our time as parents. Sure, Sara went back to work after Robert too (and last time it was full-time).

But last time we were extremely lucky in that we had a relative who was able to do the child-minding for us – something which isn’t possible this time round. Robert spent Sara’s work hours with his aunt Katy, who very kindly looked after him along with his cousins who are around the same age.
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Before I start this post, I want to make one thing very clear: I’m writing this because I love the subject matter, not because anybody has asked me to write it, or even suggested it. As most of you will know, if ever I write posts on subjects I have been ‘incentivised’ to cover, I make that very clear. So, with that out of the way, on with the show…

Last weekend, Sara and I took Robert and Freddie for a trip to one of our local National Trust properties – Basildon Park, near Pangbourne here in Berkshire. Sara and I have been Trust members since 2002, and now have a family membership which we’re making quite good use of. At last count (which I regularly do, as part of a “How much money have we saved by being members?” test!) we’d been to 10 in this membership period alone – so I consider myself reasonably familiar with their ‘offering’.
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Whilst reading Robert his bedtime stories tonight, I chanced across a new book which we’d not read before. As Sara often gets books out from our local library, we try to mix the newly-lent books in with our more regular favourites – if for no other reason than to avoid the tedium!

Tonight’s book was one called “The Littlest Dinosaur and the Naughty Rock“, and – if you haven’t figured it out from the title – it concerns a little dinosaur who gets sent to the dinosaur equivalent of the naughty step. I won’t spoil the ending for you all, but needless to say he learns a valuable lesson while there…
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Back in June 2011, just one week before Freddie was born, I wrote a post about the curious subject of “VBAC” – aka “Vaginal Birth After Caesarian. If you didn’t read it back then, you might like to quickly now before I go on, as things have taken an interesting turn this week:

Fatherhood²: “VBAC for good” and other strange things

So, for the uninitiated, the NHS generally recommend that mums who have previously had a Caesarian birth and are pregnant again should TRY to give birth naturally. Despite a lot of stories about the risks of ruptures, tears and muscle damage, the natural method is pushed VERY strongly by most doctors.
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This weekend just gone, Sara and I took the boys in to some very treacherous woods and pushed one of them down a hill, whilst balancing the other precariously at the top of a muddy ledge. Before you call Childline, I should probably explain – it’s alright, because loads of other parents were doing the same thing!

Okay, so it’s not quite as bad as it sounds – and maybe I exaggerated the “pushing” part above…! We were actually taking part in a “Learning Through Nature” day which had been organised by Robert’s (excellent) pre-school, along with a lot of other pupils and their families.
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Well, after over 9 months dreading it, the day has finally come for my wife to step back in to her other job. She isn’t going back properly until mid-April, but her school (and I suspect many other industries) offer returning-to-work mums the ability to take a number of “Keep in Touch” days throughout their maternity leave, and that’s what she’s doing today.

All together Sara will be taking 5 of these “KIT” days before she returns properly, and because our full-time care arrangements for the boys don’t officially begin until that point, I’m taking 5 days off work (over the next 4 weeks) to look after Robert and Freddie on these days.

Nothing particularly out-of-the-ordinary there, and aside from my inability to breast feed (which could cause some fractiousness with the younger child by the afternoon!) Read the rest of this entry »