Becoming a parent is not easy, and although the current social climate is geared towards expressing emotion, it is sometimes still strange to be a male trying to express feelings about one's own children, especially if it is as part of a fight for a right to spend some time watching them grow. As a stand for all the men out there who also want to watch their little ones slowly mature, my advice is to stand up for your desires and enlist the help of an aupair to ensure that you can work with a clear conscious, spend precious time with your family and still have hours left for a bit of 'me' time. It's not just for the girls you know! When my wife and I found out that we were to be expecting our first child, we made a bold decision to cut our hours of work in favour of raising our baby ourselves. Initially the idea was that I would continue my job as a journalist, but work freelance from home, and my wife would reduce the hours she put in at her alternative health centre, more or less allowing us to work shifts when it came to housework and childcare. Little did we know that in the world of parenting planning such things brings no guarantee of harmonious living! Initially we found it difficult, as new parents do with sleepless nights and a distinct lack of social life, but there was something else we hadn't bargained for going on in the furore of sleep deprivation and dirty nappies. It was only a couple of months before we realised that not only were we missing out on martini lunches and sweet dreams, we were missing out on each other, and even more crucial than that, we were not experiencing our baby grow together. Now being a new age bloke, I can get away with that statement. I'm sure that back in my father's day if he showed any signs of sentimentality towards his offspring he would have been swiftly marched to the outskirts of town and forced to do something suitably manly to compensate. Thankfully, times have moved on and I am quite within my rights to show my emotions without being branded as some sort of mentally unbalanced freak. Well, my wife and I decided that we would make yet another bold move and hire an au pair to care for our child while we worked, leaving us to care for our child together when we weren't. The decisions to take in an au pair rather than a nanny were many. Firstly, having an au pair is a much more informal affair, and we found it suited our somewhat bohemian style of life (what was left of it!). Au pair pairings are more based on an exchange of cultural and social experiences rather than some sort of Mary Poppins taking over the parenting role, and basically in exchange for a room, some food and bit of pocket money, we had an energetic and spritely young lady taking care of the baby for a few hours a day, doing a spot of washing up and generally helping out about the place. This symbiotic relationship meant that we had someone we could rely on and trust to take care of our baby while we worked, and was also available should we find the courage, or more specifically, energy to go out on an evening. Having an aupair allowed us to start regaining our life and our independence, but above all, it meant my wife and I could have quality time with our baby together, something that allowed us to witness the first laugh, first crawl and first steps together.
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