Kids and Stuff

I was thinking, as I was changing Maia on my lap in a tiny toilet in a cafe today, how many things you normalise as a parent when living here. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is immediately noticeable how much more the UK or New Zealand, for example, are set up to include children in terms of infrastructure.

There are, for example, no changing facilities at all (ah, no, there is one in the shopping mall at Alto Palermo), and precious few play parks or anything specifically kid-friendly like that. Nearly every play park I can think of is a death trap, with swings that look like they've been built one hungover Sunday afternoon by an overly-nagged Dad who's hammered a brace of rusty nails through the first bit of 2 by 4 he could find. There. Swing. Happy now?

Then again, when I've asked, I've been motioned into the following places to change Leah: the men's toilet, the women's toilet, a shop changing room, a park bench, into a kitchen on a table.

Restaurants don't have high chairs as standard, although most have a kinda high stool things that, after two or three solid concussions, kids soon learn not to topple forward. Or lean. But we've long since chosen our brunch/lunch places based on how likely the staff are to take your kids away and play with them while you eat. Not be nice to them, or let them in, but take orders with your child in their arms while you relax over brunch and a glass of champagne (take a bow, Laura, the maitre d' from Olsen, tragically no longer working there. Hopefully she won the lottery) 

Driving a pram is a serious operation, and we're on our 4th in 2 years. They're just not built to handle Argentine paving. So we now have one of those überparent-three-wheeler-dual-child-wider-than-a-Humvee-pricier-than-your-car-pavement-clearing monsters that is the baby equivalent of the BatMobile. Still, no one seems to mind. You don't get scowled at. People look baffled, but never the Dulwich Village competitive aggression.

It's a world free of parent groups or anything to help you other than people just being nice.  

In the UK there is a space and a place for everything, so people assume you're catered for, and that's where you should go. Don't expect a seat on the bus just 'cause you chose to have kids, there's a system, you know? You could have filled in the form before your journey, and then they'd have kept you a seat.

In a sentence summary: there is kind of a nice community of parents bonding due to the lack of provision  to help them out, rather than fighting over what is there.