A Day at the Farm

I'm terribly behind in my blogging responsibilities, I know, and I do apologize. We had a busy weekend with friends and family, which included my little niece sleeping in our office - thus, no computer. Thus, no Sunday night blog post. This I shall quickly remedy.

A couple of weeks ago we took Isaac up to Nan Gailyn's farm to see the 4-day old calves.
As you can see, he was dead keen.

You might remember our visit last year to Staglands in the Akatarawas, where upon seeing a couple of lambs Isaac - then not even two years old - said, in all seriousness:

"Lamb...Food...Dinner."

Yip. Macabre as it may seem, I felt like I must have doing something right that my boy recognised that food doesn't come from a shop, but from the real world.

On the drive up to the farm the other day, he saw cows out the window of the car, and had this to say on the matter:

"That's a cow."

"That's beef."

"That's dinner."

With apologies to any vegetarians reading (No, I'm not getting into that discussion here), I consider this continued success. He also knows that milk and cheese come from cows, that chickens give us eggs, and that we also eat chickens.

No sugar coating here.

Unless you're talking about the alpacas:
I'm not sure what he sees in these surly, smelly beasts of burden, but Isaac just loves getting to see alpacas, and even pat their ears. Maybe it's because we don't eat alpaca - we just wear their wool.

That's all for now. I've got a mountain of writing work and audio editing that I need to get up to date with, so I'll be back soon with more foody goodness.

Take care everyone.

A Dad responds to Lyn Craig

It's taken me a while to get this post up because I wanted to be able to supply the audio that I'm responding to, rather than blathering on in the hope that a reader or two might happen to have heard the same interview on Radio New Zealand last Wednesday. I've now got the audio on my computer but have to figure out how to upload the file to Blogger. Any advice?

Meanwhile, the interview can be listened to here, until they take it down.

Lyn Craig, Social Researcher with University of NSW Social Policy Research Centre: Interview with Noelle McCarthy, Radio New Zealand, Wednesday 22 October 2008, 2.10pm (approx 17 minutes)

Having listened to it again, I realise that it was not quite as insulting as it first seemed when I heard it in broken snippets at work the other day, but there are still several statements that Craig bases her research on with which I strongly disagree. And since I have a soapbox, I intend to declaim from it.

The headline grabber is that: "Australian Fathers spend 6-7 minutes a day with their Kids." OK, I'm not Australian, and the research doesn't cover New Zealand, and Craig is not even trying to present a picture of a regressive chauvinistic male population who leave the childcare to the Mums of the world. But what I protest is that a Dad who spends time "reading, talking and playing" with his kids, in her opinion, is not spending time caring for his children. Craig defines "childcare" as sole care and the work of cooking, tidying, changing nappies, bathing, dressing, picking up and dropping off from school etc.

What's a guy supposed to do? Get home and send the wife down the pub until after bedtime, in order to qualify as "caring for" his children?

Men also get no credit for spending time together with the family on the weekend, according to Lyn Craig. Oh, this is all good and well for the family, she says, but it's not childcare as long as the father isn't doing it on his own.

Give us a break!

At the risk of sounding like a backward male, I get up at 6am to go to work and get home around 4.45pm. I know that during that time Dessert Chef has the hard work of getting Isaac up, dressed, fed, entertained, fed again, entertained, changed, fed again, into bed, up, dressed, fed again, entertained, watered, etc etc etc until 4.45 when I get home. I know that this is hard work, that it is sole care, and that it is a completely different dynamic to working together as a family on the weekend or in the evenings.

However...

From the time I get home until Isaac goes to bed, he's my responsibility. I entertain him, we play, I cook the family dinner (with everybody's help, usually), I give Isaac his bath while Dessert Chef does the dishes, I get him into his pyjamas and we read books for anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour, before I give him some pudding, brush his teeth, give him a bottle, and get him into bed. This is usually about three hours, but according to Lyn Craig, the only time that I would be able to count as "caring" for my son would be the 20 minutes of giving him a bath and getting him dressed. Sure enough, according to Craig, this gives me three times the effort that the average Australian Dad can lay claim to, but for three hours work I feel a bit cheated.

As a family, I know that we are very, very lucky. We can afford to have Mum at home looking after our son, and I have negotiated hours that allow me to have quality time at home in the evenings and weekends to do my bit towards being a Dad and raising my boy. (Sidebar - I put aside a career in a highly lucrative but terribly demanding part of my industry to be able to work those family-friendly hours. We may be a little worse off financially for it, but I have never regretted making that choice.)

Those three hours are what I look forward to all day at work, and so does Dessert Chef, because she knows that when I get home she gets to relax. That's what teamwork is all about. I take offence at the idea that my contribution is nothing more than a hobby.

I'm sure Lyn Craig didn't set out to engage in a campaign of reverse sexism, or to deride the efforts and advances made by progressive members of both genders over the past fifty years. It's not what she has witnessed and reported on that I take issue with. It's how she chooses to define what parenting is. I get the feeling that in her estimation dual-income households where both parents share the duties of child-rearing in combination with outside childcare would be an ideal.

We eschew this concept, for two reasons. For one, the decision to strive for two incomes, however necessary it may be, is all part of the problem that we are facing today with the global economic collapse. There is a line between staying out of poverty and simply being greedy. We choose to place our family above all else and keep our heads above water, rather than pursue the almighty dollar with our every energy. It's tough at times, but it's worthwhile. Secondly, what is the point of working and paying someone else to raise your children if you can possibly afford not to? I know that I'm likely to draw a string of invective about this, because it's one of those hot issues that everyone has a deeply held opinion about, but our feelings are pretty straightforward: the best people who can raise our children are us.

I'd love to hear what others out there think, and how people in circumstances different to ours cope.

We must be doing something right

I hear a lot of parents (and other non-parental adults) lamenting that their children seem to have no idea where their food actually comes from. Mostly the answer to the question "where do we get milk from?" is not "a cow" but "the shop".

Last weekend we went to Staglands with Aunty L, Uncle B and their kids. Being spring, the place was alive with chicks, ducklings, goslings, kids and lambs.
When Isaac got to this pen, and we told him that this was a lamb, this was his reaction:

"Lamb?"
"Food?"
"Dinner?"

I guess he must know at least that much, then.

Things that Fatherhood has Taught Me

1. Anything which looks like something that you know the word for can legitimately be called by the name of the thing you know;
2. If it looks like a bug, its a bug;
3. If it says MEOW, its a Fluff;
4. If it has four legs and isn't a Fluff, it says WOOF;
5. Unless its a cow, in which case it says Moo;
6. Or sometimes WOOF;
7. Lions and Tigers say ROAR, but leopards don't. Silly Daddy.
8. Being overtired does not mean that the 18-month-old will go to sleep any more easily;
9. Being outside is much more fun than being inside, unless the Fluff is inside, then being inside is much cooler;
10. If there's water, then that's the best place to be;
11. If there's also mud, that's even better;
12. Helping Daddy with Cooking means grabbing any utensil you can lay your hands on and taking it to the couch, or the bathroom, or the bedroom, and then forgetting about it;
13. If it looks like a sausage, it probably is. Best try eating it to check;
14. Chairs are not for sitting, they are for climbing, as are couches and tables and beds and benches and clothesracks and anything else that can be reached, either from the floor or wherever a stool can be pushed to;
15. "One More" can be applied to any situation any number of times to allow a given activity to continue indefinitely, or until Mummy or Daddy enforces the "Last One" instruction - usually two or three times;

And finally, as a Dad I've learned that when you have to walk at the same pace as the 18-month-old, and you have to stop and inspect all the marvels of the world as closely as he does - things like flowers, and drains, and puddles, and pinecones - you'll find that there's more all around you to see than you've realised in the years since you used to walk that slow and look at the world with such awe and fascination. So no matter how old you feel, sometimes it can be worthwhile to take the time to see things like an almost-two-year old again.