Hello Internet,
My name is Daniel Hurst (you can call me Dan) and I am Oscar’s
dad. Oscar (Ozzy/Oz) is currently 11 months old and, as a stay-at-home dad, is very much
at the centre of my ever-shrinking universe. He is also the most beautiful baby
the world has ever seen. Not that I’m biased.
I have decided to write this blog as a way of documenting
the first days of Oscar’s life and the lessons that my fiancee, Steph, and I
learn as we embark on first few tentative steps together as a new family.
I am hoping that this will be a record for Oscar to look
back on in older life and realise that we didn’t mess him up intentionally, and
also a sounding board for those of you out there embarking on similar journeys.
Plus, writing a blog is what all the cool kids do so I thought that I should
jump on the bandwagon …
I guess the first thing to do is to tell you about Steph and
me, Oscar’s parents and the situation that we find ourselves in starting out as
a young family.
We live in central London. I’m starting with this because it
plays a huge part in forming who we are and the things that we enjoy doing.
Like many families, we are aware of all the problems that raising a child in a
huge metropolis like London raises – the city is expensive, dirty and noisy.
And we love it. We are determined to cling on to our London life for as long as possible
– yes, we want Oscar to have space to run around and it would be great if he
had access to a garden (we live in a 9th-floor flat without any outside
space) and we know the benefits of raising children in the countryside having
both been raised in the sticks ourselves. But we’ve both been in London for
about a decade, it’s where we met and fell in love and it has a vibe and energy
about it that you can’t get anywhere else - it’s home and we want it to be home
for as long as possible (ideally in a three-storey Georgian townhouse with a
basement kitchen on a garden square, but anyway …). A lot of what I write about
on here will be about London and why it’s actually a great place to raise a
child with incredible amenities and amazing heritage and culture on your
doorstep, access to great schools and a huge range of activities for children close
by (you can tell that I’ve talked myself into this..).
Steph works in recruitment in the city and I work as a
freelance cookery editor from home. I made the jump to freelance because
nursery costs were so expensive that it seemed like a good thing to try at this
stage of my career. Plus it meant that one of us got to be there for Ozzy day to day. So far it’s going well, but it’s very hard to get the work done and
look after Oz – and it’s getting harder every day with his mobility and
natural inquisitiveness developing more and more as he grows. We both feel that
it’s really important for Oscar to get out and about to explore and play as
much as possible, so I do a lot of work at night, but that’s fine – it means
that I get to spend my days playing with Ozzy and for the most
part he’s an absolute delight. For the most part.
So that’s us. And this is my first blog post – let’s hope I
keep it up.
Dan out. x
No comments:
Post a Comment