I finally met my daughter when she was ten days old after a horrendously slow journey home from South Korea. Bursting through the door on a late summer’s afternoon, tired and bedraggled from the long journey, my heart was pounding – I was so excited. To my amazement everyone was asleep. Jasper sprawled out at one end of the sofa in the way only four year olds can, Emily curled up at the other end, desperately trying to catch up on ten days with very little sleep. There on the floor, wrapped up in a white blanket in a tiny basket, was my daughter, red faced and utterly content. It wasn’t exactly the reception I’d been hoping for, but it really was quite emotional.
I still felt detached, however. It wasn’t for another week after returning, when giving tiny Daisy a bath and she looked up into my eyes, that I felt the connection. With Jasper I’d been there every step of that painful (for Emily) way, and my child felt like mine. I’d missed that initial connection with Daisy – it was very strange as everyone in our extended family had met her before me. When the connection did finally arrive, I knew it was strong. Daisy is my daughter and I love her more than it’s possible to explain.
Jesse Bear, our third child, was born while I was on a training camp in South Africa. The timing was a little unlucky, as he was booked in to arrive via C-section when I was home but he decided to make a break for it three days early. Of course, there wasn’t much we could do about it. When Jesse was taking his very first tiny breaths of cool, fresh air, I was gasping for any air on a rowing machine in the sweatbox of our hotel gym with 25 other men. When I had requested to delay my training session so that I could wait by the phone to hear the news, Jürgen Gröbler replied, ‘Alex, zere is nothing you can do. But maybe it will make you row faster?’
So that was that. The moment passed in an extremely undignified fashion – me, eight thousand miles away, dressed in Lycra, dripping with sweat. We now had three children.
Time is the one resource we can’t buy but we all want. The appreciation of time is never more apparent than when bringing up children, as you can see it disappearing before your eyes – the changes a baby goes through, the clothes they quickly grow out of, the foods they learn to eat and the words they start to say. Everything in a child’s life changes fast, and as a parent it’s all too easy to miss these transformations. Blink – and they’re gone. Over the course of my sporting life I’ve learnt how important the moments are that we have together as a family. From missing two of the three births, to never having a weekend away together, it was always so important to make the most of the short time we had and try to create lasting memories. Rowing certainly isn’t a sport that pays well, so we were always limited by what we were able to afford to do. But in turn this forced us to become creative.
The most surprising change for me on becoming a parent was the improvement in my mental well-being. My own misconception was that having children would distract and take focus away from my sporting aspirations. What’s more, I believed the physical effort of having children would hamper my performance in one of the world’s most demanding and relentless training regimes. In all honesty the opposite was true. I believe having children altered my perspective, redressed the balance and without question improved my performance. I could see this almost immediately – and it continued until the end of my career as a sportsman. I’m not saying it was easy – it certainly wasn’t – but both parts of my life were mutually supportive and beneficial. Through making the most of our limited time together, I became a better parent. Consequently, I could do my job more effectively, with improved and more consistent results.
As a parent it’s all too easy to flick on the TV and find something there that appeals to our children. In our house we’re all addicted to screens in some way. It’s easy to flick a switch, then hear the decibel level in the house go down and the arguing stop (until the TV’s turned off, when somehow little people become even grumpier!). I find it seriously hard to imagine how parenting was possible before TV and the internet.
We’ve found it’s important to balance out this screen time with something that embeds valuable, lasting memories in the souls of our children. Of course we must embrace technology for our children’s sake – they need to be able to navigate the connected world, and I’m certainly not advocating total technology rejection – but there is more we can do to help create happy, healthy children and adults. Lasting memories can easily be made for very little or no cost other than time and just a bit of thought and effort.
Dadventures is a book for families. It’s a book for mums, dads, grandparents, uncles and aunts. It’s a signpost for people who want to be shown how easily long-lasting memories can be made. In no way is it a definitive, encyclopaedic guide. It’s simply a starting point, a foundation upon which anyone can build their very own skills, thoughts and ideas, and develop their imagination outdoors.
Not everyone will want to do everything in this book. That’s OK – the idea is to pick and choose, start something and move on to the next, or alter it to meet different situations and requirements. Everything in this book we’ve done as a family, and the experiences described are all true. Some activities we do regularly because we love them and we know that time spent doing these things is not time wasted.
My family, by Daisy. We all have big belly buttons and very long toes!
Let’s be honest, though. Not everything is always going to go right; the unpredictability of children means having to adapt, walk away, stop completely or start something again. This challenges us adults as much as it does the children, but that’s all part of the benefits of making these memories outdoors. Some of our strongest and funniest recollections of the times we’ve had together are when something didn’t go right, like the time Jesse fell in the only puddle in a five-mile radius, became instantly soaked to the skin and screamed until he was sick. At the time it felt like a disaster, but now we sit around the dinner table and laugh about that together – and will continue to do so for many years to come.
The possibilities are limitless out there, and it’s often the first step outside the front door that is the hardest. What children want is time together, any time. Nothing has to be perfect for it to be memorable. I hope you enjoy … Happy memory-making!
Alex, Emily, Jasper, Daisy and Jesse
‘Observation is a dying art.’
Stanley Kubrick
There’s a period of time between the end of school and dinner time. It’s a grey area, fuzzy and non-specific. There’s a lot to do in these few hours … but also nothing to do. Sometimes there’s an after-school club that fills the time – multi-sports, football or tennis, or an art club at which your child paints a colourful mess on a thin piece of disintegrating paper, a masterpiece you’ve got to keep for years in a pile on a kitchen surface otherwise you’re a bad parent. But some days there’s nothing to do. Everyone is tired and hungry, and children are often bad-tempered from having had to rein in their emotions all day in the classroom.
It’s all too tempting to go straight home, switch on the TV as you walk briskly through the house to the kitchen and flick the kettle on for your umpteenth coffee of the day. You need this coffee just to get you through the next few hours of the afternoon and into the evening. You spend two hours pottering around, tidying up, finishing off a bit of work, starting jobs you won’t finish that evening, while the kids become lethargic and bored, watching nothing they’ll remember on the TV. I should say here that watching TV is sometimes the right thing for them to do. There are some fantastic programmes for all ages on TV, and giving kids the opportunity after a busy day at school to rest on the sofa engrossed