Three Vignettes

We are out in Haga, a quaint district of Gothenburg known for its bohemian charm. It's a freezing afternoon, the low sun starting to vanish and leaving the streets full of icy blue shadows. After a few hours of sight-seeing with Farfar and Farmor, who are here to meet F, we're all tired and wanting a warm coffee. There's a place V and I have been to before that do giant kanelbullar, we head over and go in.

And are ejected.

It's a standard parental crime, and we feel the standard parental outrage - the cafe will only allow one pram in at a time, and they've already filled their quota. The waitress who tells us is quite abrupt, which adds insult to injury.

Worse, there are no coffee places we can find in Haga that have room for children.

We slog all the way to the other side, getting colder and wearier, before giving up and going back into the centre of town and a generic, accepting Espresso House (a sort of Svensk equivalent of Starbucks, who haven't got much of a foothold here). Less character, but less hassle.

A year ago, I would have been fairly unsympathetic to parents attempting to clutter up a coffee house with bulky prams.  Now I hate coffee house business practices, same as the next dad. I don't know if my immediate volte face proves anything revolutionary, but there it is.

- 

Farfar and Farmor have taken F out in for an hour's walk, leaving V and I at home. It's still cold out, tiny flakes of snow fluttering down in a disorganised way as the moisture in the air freezes. Will they be okay? Will the three-wheeled pram catch on a curb and tip over? Are the three layers we've wrapped F in going to be enough?

What if bears choose this morning to rampage through Brunnsparken? 

It's an odd peace I get when family borrow our baby. Half my brain relaxes and say 'yes, some rest! Without guilt or wailing!' The rest cripples me with anxiety, a great claw of reflexive parental panic resting over my heart and just waiting to clench.

- 

The first time Farfar takes F up in his arms and walks her round the flat, he starts singing. And the song he sings? Rockabye Baby, the exact same one I first sang to her in the hospital. Perhaps its coincidence, perhaps not.

It's funny, in the weeks before the birth, I kept having strange memories of being young surface in my mind. Little snatches of things we said or did, many of them specifically ones that Dad did. Watching him with her, I realise how much of the way I behave with my daughter is copied from him.

Both of us are very lucky to have that model, I think.