Posts Tagged ‘Guest Post’
Fatherhood²: Guest Post – The Real Purpose of Ante Natal Classes
Stage 1. Conception. Stage 2. Back up required – in the form of information and people. Stage 3 – booking an ante natal class.
Knocked up? Bun in oven? Don’t know the difference between pethidine and methadone? Confused by the amount of words in your baby book beginning with “Con2? Conception? Contraction? Condescending? Only ever seen a nappy on a PG Tips Chimp? You need ante natal classes. Let’s break this down in to manageable chunks.
Purpose number 1 of the ante natal class – Buying your future life long friends.
With us, first came the joy, the excitement, the hugging ourselves and each other with complete and total blissful happiness of finding out “we” were going to become “a 3″. Then, shortly afterwards came the real light-bulb going off moment – we had to get some friends and quick. Our kid was seriously going to need mates. He was already likely to be ginger (like me) and hairy (like husband). If we were going to give birth to ‘Cousin It’ from The Addams Family we needed to ensure he had back up on the school playing field. Not being locals and because my husband is incredibly anti-social (“I have enough friends Han. All 3 of them. Who live 2 hours away. In different directions”) we knew no one in the area, other than each other. So we bought some people to hang out with.
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Fatherhood²: Guest Post – My Mother Superiority Complex, or How I Learned to Let Go and Let Dad
“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
In October 2004, when our son Evan was 9 months old, we packed our things, and moved out of the small university town my husband Andrew and I called home for over a decade. We headed to Dublin for a year so Andrew could finish his PhD. research. While I knew this was a valuable scholarly opportunity for Andrew—he would have access to archives, libraries, and people he could never meet living in our town— I was extremely nervous about what would happen to me, a new mom, living in an unfamiliar country, in a city with more than quadruple the population of the one we’d left. I was unable to work legally, and chose not to undertake a formal course of study since I already had my MA. It was therefore decided that I would stay home to raise our son. Our extremely meager living stipend didn’t stretch far in Dublin, which meant that our days out consisted of free museums, walks in the park and around the city, and the occasional trip to the coffee shop.
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Fatherhood²: Guest Post – The Only Dad in the Park
We live in the 21st Century. Apparently we are modern, diverse and multi-cultural. Women can vote. Men use moisturizer. We certainly don’t confirm to the patriarchal norms laid down by our unenlightened pre-historic forefathers.
I went to the park with my two young sons today after collecting them from school. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, full of hope for a decent Spring, and the park soon filled up with their friends and other kids from nearby schools. After a while I looked around and realised that I was the only member of the male gender in the vicinity over the age of seven…
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