Back to work today after two and a half weeks at home with the new baby is pretty tough.
I keep telling anyone who’ll listen that I’m really jealous of two guys I know who are both relatively new dads – one is a University professor who (I assume on purpose) timed his sabbatical year to coincide with the birth of their child. The other is an RCMP officer who was able to take a year’s paternity leave at 90% salary since his wife was already a stay-at-home mom to their first child.
When I’m King of the World, a couple of my first changes will be to extend maternity leave benefits to 18-months instead of a year (not least because there’s a “daycare gap” in our society when many moms get a year of leave but many day cares won’t take kids until they’re 18 months, forcing parents to scramble, take longer (usually unpaid) leaves, rely on relatives or pay extra to put their kids in one of the few daycare spots for younger kids.) And while I’m doing that, I’d also allow new fathers to take a six month paid paternity leave, structured similarly to and in addition to maternity leave (unlike the current situation where parents often have the option for both but have to choose one or the other instead of both a paternity and maternity leave at the same time.)
[Edit: A co-worker suggested an alternate plan that may be more workable than allowing concurrent leaves. Give the mother a year as is currently the case but then grant the father an additional six month leave instead of giving the mother 18 months. That way you still close the “daycare” gap and both parents get a leave with the child, just not at the same time – unless the wife chooses to take an extended leave as Shea has done and will do for both of our kids.]
Many people only focus on the economic bottom line for questions like this – oh, the cost to EI would be too high, productivity would go down, employers would struggle to replace fathers who go on the leave.
But I think the overall benefit to our society of allowing full families to bond in a child’s earliest months, although difficult to measure on a spreadsheet, would pay off greatly in the long term in ways we can’t even imagine. Less postpartum depression. Less divorce. Less child abuse. A stronger social fabric overall. Who knows what else having fathers more involved could lead to? (And I can’t help but note that what I’m proposing probably falls into what would more traditionally be seen as a “conservative” (eg. family-centered) value if you choose to look at it through that lens.)
A man can dream…
Anyhow, this song doesn’t *quite* capture what I’m talking about but it’s a fun one so I’ll post it anyhow. Oh, and today is Sasha’s *official* due date. I’m *really* glad she came out to meet us a few weeks early! We’re already three weeks closer to her sleeping through the night than we would’ve been if she arrived today! 😉
This is brilliant…although if Sasha’s anything like her big brother, she’d find a way to pee on the iPad instead of the pot. (A co-worker still brings up the story we told him when Pace was a toddler of Pace standing in our living room and peeing on our VCR!)
Pace went for an eye check-up the other day and I thought he looked positively robotic in this contraption…
Finally, Sasha doesn’t escape the nerd action either. I bought an app that works as a poor man’s video baby monitor and, in addition to providing a live video feed, also allows me to play her music and speak to her remotely as well as turning on a night light (the iPhone’s camera light).
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Education and building reading skills are part of life and in prison, part of rehabilitation. It is so important to have such things available in order to work with the prison population to prevent re-offenders. This government is not working towards crime prevention… they are working towards punishment and re-offending.
What these stories have in common is simple – no matter your role in society – police officer, librarian, politician – the ultimate truth is that how you treat others, and particularly the most disadvantaged amongst us, reflects who you are yourself.
I’m not sure if this fits as a May Day story or not but I like the sentiment – people who do tough jobs for very little reward sometimes deserve to be surprised with some over-the-top generosity (although there’s also a flip side argument that if we paid decent wages to our servers, tipping wouldn’t be required in the first place.)
At the risk of sounding like Mr. Pink from “Reservoir Dogs”, some jobs are deemed tip worthy in our society and some aren’t.
In high school, I worked a job that *wasn’t* deemed tip-worthy, pumping gas at the local Esso station while many of my classmates who worked at the attached restaurant earned 2x and even 3x what I did because serving food *was* deemed tip-worthy.
It wasn’t a big deal and pumping gas had its benefits that serving food didn’t (working outside much of the time, less being yelled at by angry customers) but it did make the odd tip I got very memorable. I never got a $500 tip but I have a fond memory of someone who came in right before closing one night, got me to do everything you could possibly do in a full serve station – fill gas, check oil, wash all windows, check tire pressures, maybe even change a wiper blade – but then gave me a $20 tip which, at that time, was probably what $500 would be to me now!
I repay that now in a variety of ways – anytime I see a kid training in their first job at a gas station or a grocery store or wherever, I make sure to give them a small tip. And anytime I fill up at the Indian Head Esso (who gained a lifetime customer by employing me for three years in high school), I tip whatever high school kid who happens to be working there now.
Tip your servers, folks (and be generous with interpreting who “serves” you – it’s not just about a restaurant meal!)
Part of what makes him so amazing is that he really shouldn’t even be here, having survived a bombing that killed three other people while riding on a train in Peru in 1986. That experience informs much of his work and if anybody can knowingly comment on the Boston bombings (and the bombing of people in general), he’s the one.
(Warning: The story he tells about surviving the bombing before playing the song “Angels” may be disturbing to some people.)
Sitting here with the new baby curled up, sleeping on my chest in the middle of the night (as she’s done many times in the past two weeks), I thought I should make a list…
TEN THINGS I LOVE ABOUT OUR NEW BABY
That amazing new baby smell!
How her little chest moves in and out when she breathes
How she sometimes does a few rapid-fire breaths before going back to her normal rhythm
She’s been a really good baby so far with very little fussing or crying (except when hungry or needing a change of course!)
Sitting with her on my chest like now is a perfect time for reading an e-book (one advantage over more unwieldy print books)
She’s given me an excuse to live in pyjama pants and t-shirts for nearly two weeks straight 😉
The way her eyes look, so curious and amazed, at things like her mobile, mommy’s face or even shadows moving on the wall
That, after some initial doubts, her big brother absolutely adores her, cares for her, and watches over her
Thinking about her next few months and years of development. I still maintain that around age three is my absolute favourites but the lead-up to that period is pretty cool too!
