Author Archive
Fatherhood²: The Best Father’s Day Video. Ever.
You’ve probably all seen this already – I’m usually the last one to the party on these things.
But just in case you HAVEN’T, and since it combines three of my favourite things (being a dad, Star Wars and Lego!) I felt obliged to share it…
Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader have never been so sweet!
Made by Lego to celebrate Father’s Day, the video sees the famous father and son choosing to spend the day together – with brilliant results. If this doesn’t get you in the mood for a spin-off Lego TV show – “Vader and Son” maybe – nothing will!
As a bonus, here’s another great dad-related video that you may or may not have seen – it’s the current advert for Robinsons, and it contains a really nice twist (no pun intended) at the end.
Happy Father’s Day, dads!
Fatherhood²: Show Dad You Love Him – Ditch The Ties!
Last weekend, I was listening to Steve Wright on Radio 2, and as usual he was talking about some ‘research’ or tips he’d found on the web. According to the article he was reading (I think it was from MSN – most of them seem to be), Father’s Day is simple = get your dad a tie, a belt, an iPad case or some socks and he’ll know how much he’ll love you.
Well, I’m here to dish out some truth, on behalf of fathers everywhere. Considering most dads spend half their lives in an office, wishing they were spending more time with their little ones, buying them a tie or a belt is a depressing reminder of this. It’s basically saying “Thanks for working to support me – now put on this tie and head back there!”. Don’t even get me started on gadget accessories – if Dad wanted a monogrammed iPad pointer, he’d probably have bought one by now.
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Fatherhood²: 6 Reasons Why Most Parents Would Love the National Trust
Before I start this post, I should probably point out one thing: I’ve not been asked/paid to write this piece. I decided to write it this afternoon (while visiting Nuffield Place) after realising many people I know have probably written-off the National Trust as a collection of boring, stuffy houses which kids would hate.
As anybody who knows me (or follows me on social channels like Twitter) will attest, I’m a big NT fan – Sara and I have been annual members for over a decade, though I must admit we’ve been WAY more active members for the past 2 or 3. In fact, we now visit NT properties so often that we’ve probably made up for the 6 or 7 years when we’d only visit a couple of properties a year. Yep, I’m pretty sure we’re now ‘in credit’ when it comes to the membership costs versus how much we’ve saved over the years.
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Fatherhood²: Guest Post – The Problem of Parenting and Pseudoscience
There’s a common misconception that drinking a small amount of alcohol is better for you than drinking nothing at all. Maybe this is just wishful thinking on behalf of many. The key to this error is a simple misinterpretation of statistics. If we were to class people in the UK into 3 groups: A, B and C; group A being completely alcohol-free, group B drinking small moderate amounts and group C frequently drinking to excess, group B would be by far the healthiest. The problem is that the interpretation of this data does not take into account the drinking culture that we live in and as such, teetotallers often only avoid alcohol for serious reasons. They may be a recovering alcoholic or have chronic health issues that prevent them from drinking. This high percentage of health issues skews the data leading to an easy misinterpretation. While I find this example very forgivable, since becoming a father, I have been frankly staggered by the culture of pseudoscience that surrounds parenthood.
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Fatherhood²: Review – My Little Big Town
As you will probably know by now, reading is a regular event in our household – with bedtime stories happening as regular as clockwork, two books a night, come rain or shine. So when I was contacting by some publishers asking if I’d like to review some of their pre-school books, I was happy to oblige.
The creators of the ‘Little Big Town‘ series of book sent us 3 beautifully-illustrated books, as you can see below:
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Fatherhood²: Favourite Pre-school Bedtime Reads – UK vs North America
With so much talk of literacy and reading at the moment, I found myself curious to know whether the books we enjoy here in the UK are also enjoyed elsewhere in the world. As I’ve recently been invited to join a community of other Dad Bloggers – most of whom reside in North America – I thought now would be an ideal time to find out.
So, I posted a poll on my Facebook page, asking the following question: “Calling all British parents of 0-5 year olds: Which of these books feature amongst your favourite bedtime reads for the kids? Feel free to pick a few, and add your own suggestions too!”. I added a few of our own favourites, and they were soon joined by 30 more suggestions. Over 200 votes later, I had myself a top 10 list – which you can read below.
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Fatherhood²: A Hospital Stay on the Horizon
Those of you that have been reading this blog for a while (or indeed those of you related to me!) will know that both of my sons have had issues with their mouth/throat area. Both Robert and Freddie were born tongue-tied – something which we managed to rectify with Freddie (Read: “Fatherhood²: To the Hospital We Will Go… aka “I feel so tongue-tied”” if you want to get up to speed there) but which we seemingly caught too late with Robert, and have yet to resolve.
For the past 6 months or so we’ve been taking Robert on a variety of visits to various hospitals in our area, with the aim of finding out what can be done about Robert’s oral issues. That is to say, we’ve been referred to a few different specialists to analyse the issues – we’ve not been doorstepping the NHS!
Anyway, here’s a quick run-down of the issues:
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Fatherhood²: Spot the Toddler – The Return of the Pox
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about our experience with Robert contracting chicken pox while we were away on holiday in the Isles of Scilly. Whilst I appear to have been fairly realistic about Freddie’s prospects of catching it too, my buoyant mood clearly gives away how lightly I thought we’d gotten off.
In typical fashion, I definitely spoke too soon – pride before a fall and all those other cliches. No sooner had I hit ‘Publish’ on that post, Freddie began to display his own collection of pox-spots – and boy oh boy did he have a LOT of spots.
As you can see from the photo above, poor Freddie seemed to get chicken pox about 5 times as bad as his brother did – he was covered from head to toe in itchy little blotches, and the remnants are still sticking around today – over two weeks later.
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Fatherhood²: Guest Post – One of Many Parents’ Dilemmas
There are many complex decisions that we make in parenting that influence how our kids turn out. How best to nurture our precious ones, make the best of their potential and ensure they are as happy as possible – it’s tough for us as well as them!
One that plays on my mind a lot is driven by one of my eldest son’s most prominent characteristics: Toby is monumentally competitive. Firstly, is this a feature that has been encouraged in him or is it just his personality? That age old question. Even watching him grow from 8 lbs 6 oz to a chunky nearly-6 year old I am not sure, but I suspect the nature end of the nature-nurture spectrum. That’s a hunch supported by evidence from a small sample size: his younger brother is not nearly so eager to win.
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Fatherhood²: Chicken Rocks, but We’ve Got The Pox!
As my last post explained, I’ve been quite slack on the blogging front lately – both due to an overabundance of ‘stuff’ going on, and a project I did for Comic Relief which involved a brick-load of Lego. So it was with great excitement that I approached the Easter holidays – not least of all because we were FINALLY going on a family holiday.
As a family, we’d not had a proper holiday for almost 2 years – 3 years if you don’t count an extended family meet-up. So with a trip to the Isles of Scilly on the horizon, we were all getting very excited about a well deserved break.
So you can imagine our consternation when, on the very first day of the holiday (as we drove down to Penzance for a pre-holiday night in a hotel), Robert came down with Chicken Pox. What stellar timing! Having spent the past 4+ years HOPING he would be struck-down (as many of his friends have been), he managed to catch it on the first day of our holidays – disaster!
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