Five things I learned during my paternity leave
Last July our beautiful baby daughter Iokasti was introduced to the world and our lives changed once and for all. For the better. Being ex-pats in London that we’ve embarked on this journey with limited support from the rest of the family. I’m not complaining - I’m just proving context. On the contrary, it’s something both Katerina and I wanted, so we could bond and spend as much time with Iokasti as we could in her early years.
Thanks to her current employer’s maternity leave benefit, Katerina got to spend almost 9 months with Iokasti raising her to the child she still is today. Everything Iokasti has learned to this day, outside of a sloppy, accidental, almost non-existent Hi-5, is thanks to Katerina. Katerina’s maternity leave ended in April, at which point I took over for almost 3 months. Like Katerina, I’m lucky enough to work for a company that provides 3 months of paternity leave to new fathers. I took this opportunity for mainly two reasons:
To support Katerina with her easing in back to work, so she won’t have to worry about Iokasti or need to send her to nursery at such young age, and
To spend quality time with my daughter and create lifelong bonds between us.
The plan
I had high hopes and expectations for those 3 months. I even did my own research on ways to keep babies and young toddlers engaged throughout the day. I looked up activities and classes that we could go to, and I even tune-up my bicycle to accommodate a wheel-based baby chair and a heavy-duty bicycle rack so i can comfortably fit her necessities for those cycling adventures of ours. I had everything I needed to succeed as a stay-home dad, a great plan, the energy, and the drive. Nothing could go wrong. Or so I thought.
Not a single week had gone by and my plan was already failing. A what I thought it was air-tight plan was shredded to pieces by valid, but excuses nevertheless. On the first day, the weather wasn’t playing nice, the second one I needed to do a big shopping at the supermarket pushing the trolley in one hand and the buggy in the other, the third I needed to visit the orthopedics department at my local hospital and the fourth was raining again. Needless to say, the will and energy I thought were not enough.
Eventually we did end up doing most of the things I had planned, but not to the extend I was hoping. Towards the end of my leave I decided to do a “post-morterm” to identify the things that went wrong and I ended up with a list of learnings instead.
My top 5 learnings
Paternity leave is not time “off” work
When I left work to start this journey, everyone were wishing me “happy holidays”. Even though I knew it wasn’t a holiday, a part of me was hopeful I would get time to relax a bit and unwind. Little did I know that not a single day would go without me complaining about how tired I was. We associate work with what pays our bills, but staying home with a 9-month toddler is sometimes harder that your day job.
For one you need to constantly keep them entertained and make sure they learn a thing or two. Feeding them is no easy job either. An activity that used to take 15 mins max when they were on the bottle, it now takes hours if you count the meal preparation time. And then it’s the crawling. Once they figure out how to move from A to B there’s no stopping. A to B becomes C to D to Z to E to K and everything in between, leaving you running behind them making sure they don’t hurt themselves, break something or pickup dust from the floor and eat it.
Eventually, taking time off work ends up being a 14-hour shift where you don’t have time to even go to the bathroom. And before you ask, no, Iokasti doesn’t do naps during the day. We tried them. Trust me.
Patience is King
I’m not a short-witted person so I tend to keep my cool or composure when things go sour. However, like everyone else, I have my low moments when I snap at someone or something. With babies those moments become a daily routine. They don’t understand “no”, or “don’t”, or “be careful”. To them language is just sounds coming out of your mouth without context or much meaning. They don’t seem to grasp why they shouldn’t hang from the coffee table, why they shouldn’t throw their plate full of food on the carpet, or why they need to keep their voice down at 5 in the morning. Nor are they capable to speak and tell you why they’re crying even after you fed them, changed them, played with them and gave them water.
You can easily snap at any of those things and yell all you want, but you’ve accomplished nothing if you ask me. If anything your little one becomes even more confused as to why you’re shouting at them and eventually start distancing themselves from you. Instead, you summon every fibber of your patience and try to explain in a calm and reassuring voice why it’s dangerous to play with the TV cables they found under the TV stand. This way at least they don’t distance themselves from you and may be more understanding in the long run.
When man makes plans… babies laugh
We’ve all heard that saying. “When man makes plan, God laughs.” It’s true for toddlers as well. So what if the weather is nice and you have a date with the only available friend willing to go to lunch with your little one? Baby simply doesn’t feel like it and what better way to show it than throwing tantrums during lunch, deciding to take a nap in the middle of the day, or simply being in one of those days where nothing clams her down.
You could plan all your want, even have a couple of backup plans under your sleeve. If the baby “decides” it’s not her day, then all plans go down the drain. Eventually you learn how to adjust and instead of enjoying the sun at the park, you end up playing pantomime indoors and taking a walk in the rain because keeping them in for three days straight is not good for them. You quickly learn that plans are nothing more that wish-lists that may or may not happen and nothing is concrete. You try to explain that your everyone around you, and while they do seem understanding at first, they understandably avoid to arrange something with you next time around. See you in 18 years mate!
Who’s that baby?
The child you thought you knew in March, is just a distant resemblance of the child in April. I’m not only speaking in terms of how they look and how much they’ve grown. I’m mainly referring to their personality and the things they like. On Monday she can’t get enough of her fruit. She has bowl after bowl of bananas, strawberries and apples. On Tuesday she won’t even touch it, let alone smell it. Her once favorite chicken and pasta dish is not something she’s interested any more. How about that squishy toy of hers she once used to hold on to the entire day? Not amusing enough any more.
A once calm, quiet and smily child that would sit through on daddy’s lap through a boring presentation without batting an eye, has now transformed into a Tasmania Devil shouting at the top of her lungs while having daddy and mommy running around cleaning up the mess she leaves behind. She once would speak to grandma and grandma through Facetime for a good 20 minutes, now they’re lucky if she sits still for more than 30 seconds.
No single day is the same and you learn to adjust to the new reality as days go by. You keep an open mind on what each day will bring you and you grow to love seeing your little one develop their personality in ways you never imagined. One thing is for sure, the daughter I had in 2021 is not the daughter I have in 2022.
The many bugs in baby programming
Babies don’t come with manuals. You get a blender with 120 pages of instructions, and you leave the maternity ward with a couple of advice. One of these was to try and get our daughter in some sort of pattern as early as possible. We tried a few things at first including early baths, late naps, and various different eating routines before we established a pattern that works for everyone. That includes preparing for bedtime at around 7pm before hitting the sack by 8pm so she’s all refreshed and ready to go at 6 in the morning until 7pm at night with only a couple of power naps in between and three hefty meals.
With this routine in mind, I made numerous plans to put in some well-needed exercise, take her to museums, playgrounds, lunch with friends, and picnics at the local parks. The plan was to get up at 6, have our morning milk and play until 9, take a 40-minute nap, eat our fruit salad, and hit the road by 11am. And here’s where all the bugs start surfacing. Iokasti decides she needs a 2-hour nap instead. The fruits you made her for breakfast are not chilled enough so you end up making something different. She had fewer dreams last night so her morning nap is not as vital anymore and moves her nap time to 11am. The walk in the park made her feel peckish so you end up feeding her at noon instead of 2pm which means that she has a second nap earlier in the day and she’s now ready for bedtime much earlier which translates to a 5am wake up time.
And not to mention the times when she decides she needs a long afternoon nap so she has enough energy to “party” at night and stay up until 11pm. Eventually, you give up and wait to see what the day has to give. If all the stars align, you’re good to go.
Conclusions
Paternity leave was the best thing that could have happened to me up until now in relation to my daughter. It made me connect with her in ways I wouldn’t have imagined otherwise. I was there to experience most of her “firsts” and witness the development of her personality in these early days. It also taught me many things I didn’t know about myself including being patient, spontaneous, less of a perfectionist, and more giving and forgiving.
Would I do it again if I were to have a second child? Absolutely! Would I recommend it to anyone else? One hundred 100%. Work can wait and strangely, nobody will miss you and once you’re back, everyone will remember you. In fact, it took me a week to get back on my feet and continue where I left off. Now I know not everyone has this opportunity given to them, but if you did, would you do it? Let me know in the comments.
Till next time…
