There are only two types of parents in this world. Those who hate soft play and those who don’t know what all the fuss is about.
I’m in the former category. Why do I hate it so much? Because it’s a hot house environment where your sole job is to defend your kid from the sugar-fueled, unattended offspring of those who don’t know what all the fuss is about.
Tag Archives: Family Life
5 Things I Learned When Baby #2 Arrived
It’s a funny thing: LIFE. Don’t you think?
We only really get any clue of what’s actually happening around us later – with the benefit of time and distance.
This is certainly true when it comes to parenting children. Now that I’m a dad of two, my perspective is COMPLETELY different to when I was at the coalface of childcare for an only child.
Arrival of second baby throws all routine out the window | Norfolk and Suffolk Lifestyle News – Eastern Daily Press
OMG having two children is INFINITY harder than having just one! It simply isn’t double the work, it’s SO much more than that. The arrival of a second child COMPLETELY changed our family dynamic.
CHRISTMAS HAS BEEN REBRANDED
If Christmas didn’t exist, we’d need to invent it.
It’s no coincidence that the feast lies at the darkest part of the year, literally ‘in the bleak mid-winter’. A time when we need something to look forward to, a pick-me-up. Pre-Christian society understood this, with their ‘Yuletide’ winter solstice celebrations, which were neatly ‘re skinned’ (using a modern parlance) by early Christianity with the familiar Bethlehem-based narrative. The story changed, but the heart of the feast remained the same – communities coming together to celebrate, during the bleakest of seasons.
The mid-winter oasis of the ‘festive season’ was, for generations, the exclusive territory of religion. But things change, meaning evolves and time moves on. We know, of course, that the ‘holidays’ so movingly crooned of in the Cola commercial are a contraction of the Christian ‘holy days’. Yet the word no longer has an ecclesiastical connotation. The same might be said of ‘Christmas’ itself – an abbreviation of ‘Christ’s Mass’, which (I feel) wouldn’t be the primary definition for most. Like ‘holiday’, the word has new common meaning: a festive period of goodwill and joviality. There are new myths and traditions too, with John Lewis and Coca Cola at the heart of these, here in this country.
I wish those who choose to celebrate the religious during this festive time well. They do not, however, have a monopoly on ‘the true meaning of Christmas’.
The Out of Depth Dad 