Ah, I understand. There’s also versions of this type of car with a battery and a small electric motor that allow the child to “drive” at roughly the speed a grown up person would walk.

Is that car self driving or how does it move?

My daughter is currently at the phase where she is starting to play with others instead of only next to others. It took her over a year to steadily get there. Some children are shy, others are outgoing. My recommendation is to not be discouraged if there is little or no interaction between the children - that will come eventually.

I’m getting too old for this…

Thanks for sharing! It’s interesting to get the perspective from a non-heterosexual couple. We should really try to share our experience as a “regular” married couple with friends of ours who also have two children but happen to be two mothers.

Awesome! Which tool(s) do you use for the family calendar and task sharing?

Give daycare, pediatrics, classmates parents, and family and friends your contact info and instruct them to call you first

Where I live (Germany), many organisations seem afraid to call the father, even if specifically instructed to do so in my experience. Our day care for example never hesitated to call my wife for every little last thing when they knew she was on parental leave. When they knew that she was working full time again and I was on parental leave the day care seemed reluctant to call me. Even when they did, they apparently had a mental block that meant they would communicate very differently with me than with my wife. It almost feels like a man’s time is usually respected while a woman’s time is regarded as “free”, so she can pick up the kids anytime anywhere at the drop of a hat.

Make sure you know your child’s SSN, birthday, allergies

We found that keeping a shared cloud storage for things like mail from the various bureaucratic institutions we need to deal with as parents has been very helpful. Everything is available at any time without having to spend half an hour searching for the right piece of paper.

Keep a family calendar where you can see appointments

We use a google family calendar, which works like a charm. We’re trying to limit the exposure to google and similar evil tech companies recently. Do you know of a good alternative to the family calendar that doesn’t consist of just inviting each other to dozens of events?

Thanks for the insight! We talk a lot and I would hope we still manage to share a bunch of the load by taking charge of particular aspects. For instance, just like you described, my wife is in touch with other mothers and is therefore much deeper into clothes thanks to clothes sharing. Meanwhile I try to keep track of always having an adequate supply of food for the children. Still, I feel like it’s been drifting more into her direction lately, which we want to rectify.

Probably true. Luckily my son hasn’t yet gotten to that age, but he certainly will, sooner rather than later…

Thanks! This sounds interesting and I’ll look into it.

Concerning parental controls I share your doubts. While you may be able to have some form of limited control over the device used by the child, there is no control whatsoever over the type of content shared by peers. It just seems difficult to make sure that my children already have the necessary skill set of critical thinking at a very young age. I know for a fact that I didn’t have that skill at the age of 6 or 10. Luckily I only ever got my first mobile phone, a good ol’ Nokia brick, at the age of 16.