young activities

Once or twice a week, I take our son to different activities in the little town where we live. Tuesdays is the baby-activity in the shopping mall, where my son explores balancing on narrow objects, kicking small balls and picking them up and giving them to the teachers, dancing to music and interacting with other babies his age. He loves to run around and when he gets to the activity room, he forgets about me and starts to run around the room, picking up balls, telling the moms about an ambulance he hears, wanting to climb up on everything he sees. Afterwards he is always happy and tired and sometimes falls asleep in the pram on the way home.

Not far from where we live is a community center where a few times a month there is a playgroup for young children. There is a big assembly room, and my son is starting to run around the room as soon as he enters it, happily trying to follow the three year olds and imitate what they are doing. He also enjoys looking at all the books with airplanes and buses and trains and emergency vehicles. Always in the end, everyone helps out to clean the room, wipe the toys and arrange them in boxes. This I like very much; for our son to from an early age feel that cleaning up is a natural thing that everyone helps out with is a lesson for life.

At the community center, there is also another group which focuses on singing and reading and doing little crafts projects. A volunteer teacher is in charge and I think both my baby and I learn a lot, although different things. There usually are only a few children participating, and we are introduced to books and music that I do not know about, although my son wants to run around rather than sitting on my lap, listening to the stories or dancing with me on the floor to the music. He is so active, so when it came to this week’s crafts project, making a little paper Christmas wreath, I had to use all my multitasking abilities, trying to glue together paper, interesting my son in participating, all while keeping him from taking the other kids glue and stickers and playing with their newspapers lying on the floor as protective cover. In the end, we managed to make a little wreath and when we came home we put a photo in the middle and hanged it on the fridge.

Being the only dad participating in all these activities, and a foreigner who struggles with the language on top of that, it is easy to feel like an alien who looks at the world from an outside position. I do not fit the mold one bit, but while it is a intimidating sometimes (for me and maybe also for the moms) it is also a source of happiness to be able to share a new world with my son. I think we both look forward to next time when there will be New Year’s crafts – my son wanting to once more run around in the big room, me wanting to practice to joining the mum’s talk a little bit more.