Coming home from our long morning walk (read here), it was high time to make lunch. Our 20 months old child is now capable of bypassing all child locks in our house; he easily enters the kitchen part of our living room, he easily opens the child locked kitchen drawer, he finds his way to the buttons on the dishwasher. Shall we peel the potatoes together, I asked him, and fast as a lighting bolt he set out to get the chair at the table and started to move it to the kitchen area. While he was standning playing with water in the sink, I managed to peel the potatoes and clean the vegetables. As always, stopping to do something is ten times more difficult than starting, so ending the waterplay in the sink resulted in a few tears and a baby on the hip in front of the stove.
After lunch it was time for a nap. Lately it has not been unusual for our son to want to skip his afternoon lie down, but today having been a very active morning, it did not take long until he was fast asleep on the little mattress in our living room. While he was sleeping I cleaned up the kitchen and sat down with a cup of coffee and my blog. I need to take any and every chance I get to write, so those quiet times when my wife is working and my son is sleeping are my windows to the outside world.
When he woke up, I managed to enthuse my son to do a little afternoon stretching together watching a YouTube teacher. My son was happily dancing around mimicking me, until he found it more fun to climb all over me instead (and the extra weight made me stretch muscles I did not even know I had). When we were done it was time for our daily call with his Swedish grandparents. He always loves to talk to and play with them and we cannot wait until we finally meet in real life. Then after some book-reading, drawing and a quick outing it was time to start dinner preparations. My son was not too impressed by me suddenly not paying attention to him. He would not leave a single reachable thing, a single pushable button, in the kitchen alone, so I resorted to my back-up solution and suggested that maybe it was time for some YouTube. My son started to name all the different vehicle names that he knows in anticipation while the TV was starting, and I wondered as I always do at the power moving images have over little kids.
I do not want our baby to spend too much time in front of the TV but sometimes letting him watch makes it possible to do things that otherwise would not be realistic, like cooking dinner this Wednesday. When the dinner was simmering on the stove, I told our son that now it was lagom, now he had watched enough and it was time for some play instead before we eat. He made loud objections and insisted that he wanted to continue watching; I insisted that now it was lagom mycket (just the right amount of watching). I tried to tell him that everyone in our family must learn to do things lagom mycket; as I said that my mind fast-forwarded a few years and I could hear my son reply: but dad, why is it that it is always you and mum who decide how much is lagom? That is a good question indeed; oh happy negotiations in future to come, I look forward to you.
Our lady joined us for dinner after her work day and we had a joyful evening together (except for the toothbrushing that required a little bit of screen time to be able to be doable), bathing, singing. Finally I got the biggest smile ever when carrying my son upstairs to the bedroom; what a beautiful way of ending the day. And tomorrow we will do it all over again.
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I think this is as close as one can come to a happy childhood. You are doing a great job with the little boy.
Thank you, I really hope we are doing ok 🙂