Tag: parenting

Bonding with your baby

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From the father’s point of view, bonding with your baby is not only hugely important, it can also be hugely problematic:

Bonding research has long focused on the maternal relationship, but we are starting to see that paternal bonding is just as important to the child’s overall development,” says Dr. David Lamm, a family counselor and a researcher involved with the USU study. “Though it is important for babies to have a relationship with both parents, fathers often have a difficult time finding ways to bond with their newborn infants.”

From a father’s point of view, there are plenty of ways that you can encourage this bonding process: being part of the baby’s routine, making plenty of eye contact, holding your baby regularly, bottle-feeding where appropriate etc etc.


Babies: what goes in, must come out

From the baby’s point of view, things are much more straightforward. Your father is doing all the hard work on the bonding front. It’s your job to test him in order to check that he is suitable for that paternal role. This examination process is very simple, having only two steps:

  1. Prevent your father from getting a decent night’s sleep. (It should be noted that this forms an integral part of torture routines used by shady organisations worldwide.)
  2. Exude unbelievably large volumes of fluid (or semi-solids) from every orifice at every available opportunity. Extra marks will be awarded for soiling nappies and items of clothing immediately after they have been changed at 2am.

If your father still greets you with a smile when you wake the following morning, he has passed. Although, you might want to wait until he has had a shower, then vomit in his hair a bit and test his reaction, just to make sure.

A reminder

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We had a minor break-in at our house on Thursday, which capped a completely crap week off just perfectly (hence the lack of blogging). I don’t really want to go into it, but suffice to say that it really was the final icing on the coffin which broke the camels back.

So it was nice to take advantage of the stunning weekend weather to take the boy up for a run on the local school field. We sat there for a while, enjoying the view and eating jelly and custard in somewhat sombre introspection*.
Then the sprinklers came on and he made a dash for it.


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20 minutes later we returned home, both soaking wet but still somehow covered in an implausible amount of custard.

It’s amazing how one little thing can swing your whole mood around. It was a reminder that whatever bad things life throws at you, watching your 2 year old son giggling uncontrollably as you both succumb to several hundred litres of high pressure water can sort all your woes out…

 * I did anyway. He sat there eating jelly and custard via osmosis.

 

It’s a father’s job, right? Wrong.

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There are certain things that only a dad can do for his son. Buying him his first razor, teaching him how to shave, driving him to the nearest hospital with a blood bank and so on.

Of course, little Alex is some way off those days. Although that doesn’t stop him experimenting with my shaving foam if it’s not strategically placed out of his reach. He is growing up quickly though and indeed, he starts playschool on Thursday. It was this momentous occasion that tempted me into an extravagant, yet important purchase this lunchtime: A Winnie the Pooh backpack. Too cute.

The boy loves Winnie and since Disney took over the rights to his image (the bear, not my son) and americanized it, there’s no shortage of Pooh-related merchandise out there for parents to waste money on. Yes, it’s horribly commercial, but worth every penny when you see the look on his face (my son, not the bear). And I do draw the line somewhere safely on the sensible side of large purple dinosaurs.

The backpack is great. I brought it home this evening, beautifully wrapped in a plastic carrier bag and presented it to Alex in the living room. He tore it open impatiently, desperate to get a better view of the smiling ursine visage within. 
Winnie may have been grinning inanely, Alex may have been giggling gleefully, but his mum’s face was a picture. A watercolour of rage. Rage, disappointment and a touch more rage. And then a little more disappointment on a sideplate. Would you like fries with that?
Hell hath no fury like a woman mother scorned.
Somewhere just next to my left ear, a little voice whispered, “Oops. You just broke another one of those unwritten parenting laws, didn’t you?” I glanced down to see who it was doing the whispering, just in time to see a fluffy little bunny wabbit blasted from my shoulder by my wife’s laser eyes. I swear I heard it let out a fluffy little bunny wabbit scream.

It has left an unsightly burn mark on my t-shirt.

Alex likes the backpack, although it irritates him that he can’t see Winnie and friends when he has it on. Also, by the time it’s got everything he needs for playschool in there, he won’t be able to lift it either. But these are mere details.

The fluffy little bunny wabbit was correct. If you’re a dad, you must stick to the birds and bees, football and shaving. Son’s first backpack falls strictly under the heading of maternal duties.
Fathers across the world, you have been warned.