It has been a very unusual spring. My wife has a new job, our son has started kindergarten, and my parents from Sweden have come and left. Now summer is quickly approaching and a new normal is lying in front of me, although without me having any hint of what it will look like. Or I should say what it looks like – after three years of being together with my son almost 24 hours a day, I am still trying to adjust to him being at the kindergarten. Luckily he seems to have had no trouble adjusting, almost always happy when I pick him up.
With kindergarten comes the almost weekly colds and sleepless nights for our son. I try to take full advantage of the days we spend at home together while he is coughing and sneezing, reading as many books as he wants, playing together with his toys and just having some father-son-time. The other day we read a dozen books in bed after breakfast, went to the doctor and got some cough medicine while slowly enjoying the greenery on the way, had a quiet lunch before my son had an uncommonly nice long nap. When he woke up he saw the memory game we have been playing recently and we spent the afternoon eating bananas and playing memory with his own rules.
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Although the fever and coughing days are hard, I find I also quite enjoy the chance to be with my son at a slower pace. For him life is normally full speed from the moment he wakes up to the moment he falls asleep, and our sick days give us a chance to try new calmer activities together. So in a way all is well until my son is back to normal speed, almost fit to go back to kindergarten, and I have caught his cold and full speed to me feels like an impossibility (oh joys of being a parent). Though I do not know what our future holds or what our new normal will look like, I am sure we will have a lot of speed incompatibility in the years to come, so I better learn to appreciate this as well. There is always some self improvement to work on, isn’t there?
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