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Lyra Vlog

Lyra is Four!

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Fatherhood Lyra

Dad friendly baby change facilities

Al from the Dad Network has launched a campaign to get British businesses to provide Dad friendly baby change facilities. He highlights the fact that dads change nappies too and have been for a long time and yet many British businesses still only provide changing facilities in the women’s public toilets.

This is a major issue for me too as Amy works weekends so I’m Lyra’s sole carer for a lot of the time. Not only that, I will often be the one to change Lyra when all three of us are out together. So finding a place to change Lyra has proved a problem sometimes and there’s been occasions that I’ve had to change her on the floor of the gent’s toilet or if Amy is with us return and apologize that she has to do it yet again as there’s no dad friendly facilities. So it just ends up creating an inequality in the nappy changing duties that is not of my making and Amy’s meal goes cold and I’m left feeling inadequate.

Please read Al’s blog post Dad’s can’t change their baby’s nappy in major UK restaurant chains.

It’s not all bad news though as there are a number of businesses that do have great unisex baby changing facilities, and the Dad Network is helping dads discover these places.

If you’re a dad whose found himself in a similar predicament please check out the Dad Friendly Facilities page at the Dad Network site which features a map of Dad Friendly and Dad Un-Friendly locations and if you know of any near you then you can submit them to be added to the map. The South West is looking pretty empty so I’ll be making sure to add some places as I visit them this year.

Twitter hashtag #dadsforchange

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Fatherhood Lyra

The double chocolate cupcakes aren’t pretty

https://www.instagram.com/p/BA77QReLM_h/

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Fatherhood Lyra

Lyra fishing from her bathtub.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BA0hRNoLM2W/?taken-by=verymuchsomatt

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Fatherhood Lyra

Chocolate reindeer

https://www.instagram.com/p/BAx0UyaLM-o/?taken-by=verymuchsomatt

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Fatherhood Lyra

Lyra broke the eggs so I made scrambled eggs with…

Lyra broke the eggs so I made scrambled eggs with spinach and cheese for lunch.

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Fatherhood Lyra

Lyra likes to help unpack the shopping…

Lyra likes to help unpack the shopping unfortunately this week the eggs got smashed. 2 of 6 survived

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Fatherhood Lyra

Cheeky little Lyra eating cheese puffs in her car…

Cheeky little Lyra eating cheese puffs in her car seat.

https://instagram.com/p/9zMPOOrM5R/

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Fatherhood Lyra

I’ve never seen Lyra looking so grown up than in t…

I’ve never seen Lyra looking so grown up than in this photo. Also looking so much like me when I was a toddler.

https://instagram.com/p/9jx5MyLM1k/

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Fatherhood Lyra

Adventures in fatherhood: Introduction

This is a series of hopefully semi-regular guest posts that I will be making on my wife Amy’s site Very Much So…, a UK parenting and lifestyle blog.

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I’m now thirty weeks into this adventure of fatherhood and it is probably about time that I expressed my thoughts and feelings about the experience. Hopefully this will be a semi-regular feature, but first a little bit about me. My name is Matt and I’m married to Amy, my best friend and partner in crime, and dad to Lyra. I am a thirty-something IT Systems Administrator specialising in server virtualisation (I blog about it here), voracious reader, avid film fan and used to be a cinema manager.

Becoming a dad has been the most amazing and daunting thing I have had the privilege of doing. Lyra has given me new perspective and enabled me to see and enjoy the world anew. The flip side of the coin is the incredible responsibility that I now feel. She is wholly dependent on me and Amy for everything and like all new parents you can’t help but worry about whether you are doing it right. Is she warm enough? Is she sleeping right? Are we feeding her a nutritious and varied diet? However overall the joy she has brought into my life far outweighs the worry. I have loved being a father from the very second the midwife handed her to me and now cannot imagine my life without her.

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