Part time Dad....

In my group of mates there's an oft-said comment that "working is losing". Not that most of us have a choice of course - when last I checked none of us had a billionaire uncle ready to pop his clogs, nor the likelihood of discovering oil or gas in the back yard.

So work we must - which is a Bad Thing at the best of times, but for me it means being something of an absentee Dad. I go off to the office before the lad is awake, and I get home after he's gone to bed. Only the late evening nappy change/feed offers any chance to commune, and the whole point of that is not to wake him up too much! In any case, now he's starting on solid food (gulp!) that feed will disappear anyway.

It means weekends are precious in a way that I could never have imagined. It's the only time I can get to know him, study how he's changing and play a part in that change. As I stand at the freezing cold bus stop of a morning, I absolutely cannot understand how mums can choose some drab office job - the financial rewards from which are mostly soaked up by child care costs anyway - over being at home nurturing their kids. What is wrong with these people? And more pertinently why did they bother with the whole kids thing in the first place?

My job hardly pays a fortune, but sadly the missus shows no sign of wanting to take over the breadwinner duties, so a life of house-husbandry remains as big a pipe dream as discovering I'm somehow related to the Duke of Westminster...