To me it’s crystal clear to take paternity leave when a newborn arrives. I take full advantage of it and I think every dad should. To be honest I don’t get much love or anything out from our newborn daughter. Well, other than changing diapers and puke on my shirts. It’s not that bad either. I get to talk for a few minutes with her and watch her tiny head and ears and fingers and to hold her in my arms and comfort her when she has digestion problems.
The reason why I take full advantage of father’s paternity leave is because I help my wife in every way I can. Physically and emotionally. Even writing this post I hold my daughter in my arms to help her burp. Also when having a baby it means you can write one post with expanding in multiple days. I started to write yesterday and today I will hopefully wrap this up.
When I say I help my wife emotionally I mean I ask her if she slept ok even though I know she doesn’t because baby needs a lot of attention. What this does in her brain is she realizes I care about her. Side effects of sleep deprivation can be development of false memory, confusion or even depression. By constantly reminding her I care about her with words, her brain has extra support in these hard days. Once a day I grab her hands and I gently hug her. I usually do that when our firstborn is present so she sees how I treat her mother. When we go to sleep we talk about our children and dream about holidays and that this is just temporary. Sometimes we just fall asleep because we are too tired to talk or we just cuddle until one of the baby starts crying.
And now to the physical help. In the morning I take care of our firstborn. I change her diapers, give her breakfast. I ask her how her sleep was even though she doesn’t speak clearly yet and there is only “blabing”. When she eats I take care of our newborn and I change her diaper so she can maybe sleep a minute longer and as a consequence also my wife. Then I take my firstborn to a nanny on bicycle and this is my 20 minutes alone time because that’s how long it takes from our home to nanny to cycle. I then take our newborn and sit her on a table where I eat my breakfast. She loves when I talk to her out loud because she does not like the silence or to be alone in the room. That means sometimes I must take her with me to the toilet. Ahh I feel I didn’t have a proper privacy on the toilet at home for almost two years or since we got our first child. I then clean kitchen from yesterday or do laundry or clean the floor or whatever it needs to be done so we don’t sink in a trash. These are just minor chores to be done and also not every day. At around 11:30 I usually go at the local kindergarten and I take lunch so I don’t need to cook and waste time on that. Also lunches in our public kindergartens are of high quality and regulated. So win-win for us/me. After lunch or sometimes before a lunch I go for a short jogging 30-45 minutes so I refresh my mind and body. In the meantime when baby is asleep I talk with my wife or we even watch a movie or at least a part of it so we forget about our daily work. When baby is not sleeping I either hold her to help her burp or change her diapers or just hold her in my hands to cuddle her. Sometimes in the morning I just try to be as much with the baby so my wife can get a extra hour of sleep. Usually it doesn’t work because just needs to eat more often :) At 3pm I cycle again to our nanny’s house to get my firstborn. We cycle to downtown to the local playground so we play there for about one and a half to two hours. This is father daughter quality time. Then we cycle back to our home and we arrive at around 5pm. We get home where we cuddle our little infant together so the old one learns how to be gentle with a baby. Again I change newborn’s diaper if needed or just hold her because my wife is now alone one on one with our firstborn. She usually goes to play with her in child’s room. Eventually I join with firstborn and we dance together or I dance alone with my wife even if for just a few minutes. It’s nearly 7pm and I give dinner to my firstborn. After the dinner my wife brush her teeth (if it is really needed I do it too) and then we turn off all the lights and we pray next to the candle. When we finish our prayers firstborn blows the candle and I carry her in her bed. She knows it’s bed time and she falls asleep around 7:30pm. Then it is cuddle time with my wife. We cuddle and I help carry baby until 9pm when I usually change her diaper. After changing the diaper I go into child’s room to sleep with my firstborn so I can get much better sleep than my super wife so I can have enough energy to be active during the day. When it’s hard my wife wakes me up to carry our newborn… Next day we do it again.
We will do this for quite some time and hopefully newborn will soon start sleep for more than two hours long or at least her digestion problems will become less of a problem. All in all I’m happy I have paid father’s maternity leave and I can be part of our children’s lives.