The father who does not teach his son his duties is equally guilty as the son who neglects them

I have to go back to work on Wednesday. My workplace has no paid or unpaid paternity leave policy (we don't even have a maternity leave policy), so someone has to go out and keep Henry in grapes. That lucky someone is me!

I have managed to save up all of my annual leave, TOIL and have wrangled some sick leave taken as carers leave (as allowed in the award) to give me two weeks paid leave, and then working two days a week for five weeks. Then it is back to full time.

I was fortunate enough to have circumstances allow me to work from home ninety percent of the time for Henry's first eight months, so let's just say that I am far from content to go back just a few weeks from Ezra's birth. That said, I'm in a better position than many fathers. If anyone has the secret ingredient for managing to get BOTH parents a greater slice of the parenting pie, I am all ears!

To satisfy myself, today I am going to have a 'Henry and Ezra jamboree', and post a few pictures through the day, so that I can load them up on my desktop at work and feel homesick.

Comments

Rachel E. Adams said…

The best way to get enough paternity leave that I know is to move to Canada.

4 August 2008 at 15:05

Kitty said…

parents have it tough, in general. I dunno how you do it.

I heard a poll from NPR that said more people with kids feel unhappy than people without kids. The reason they gave was not the kids themselves but the lack of support society gives to parents, and the cost of raising children.

there is so much sacrifice involved. Amazing that our population is increasing!

9 August 2008 at 22:12

Kris McCracken said…

Kitty, I think some people have kids thinking that it is all sweetness and light, and are thus unhappy to find out that it is often a grind and way more difficult than the child free life. Personally, I think that it doesn't help that people are compelled to say "I wouldn't have it any other way" when quite often you quite rationally think to yourself "oh for a time when I didn't have kids!".

People are only human.

19 August 2008 at 20:46

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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