The Summer of Armando

My name is Armando, a Venezuelan living in Massachusetts and I work for a company that offers a few great benefits. One of them is what they call "bonding leave". The policy consists of giving a new parent eight weeks, fully paid, to spend with a new born or newly adopted child the first year of his/her life. So basically for a man it works as paternity leave and for a woman eight extra weeks added to the maternity leave. The US is not characterized by their great child bonding policies so it is probably close to the best you can get. In my opinion it is actually better than what my wife got. Even though she had to go through the whole child birth effort all she got was a fully paid week of vacation, four weeks of 75% pay and another 4 unpaid weeks. All I did was stand there next to her saying breathe a couple of times and I get fully paid 8 weeks??

So my wife, Alegna, is getting back to work tomorrow, after three months of great childcare, and leaving all the baby responsibilities for the next two months to me. These past three months since Matias was born I have been mostly a tourist. I helped with some diapers and bottles but most of the work was done by my wife. It has been tough on her and she has taken it like a champion. Now, it is my turn to keep my end of the bargain. Two months off work with the responsibility of all house chores, late night feedings, cooking and all that my wife has accomplished until now. I have been practicing the past couple of nights to get used to the schedule. It's going to be tough! But my plan is to make the most of it: the Summer of Armando!

My plan is to have short daily posts with some interesting details of what might have happened on that day. Is it going to be interesting? I have no idea. I'll try to mix it up a little, I'm a big movie buff with a DVR full of TCM movies that I expect to watch. I'll be taking walks around the neighborhood to see if I can catch some Pokémon in Pokémon GO. Go into the twitter black hole every once in a while trying to filter real news from fake news coming from the Venezuelan protests. But mostly, I'll try to survive doing something I have a little experience doing (I also have a 3 year old named Lucas) and try to enjoy it as much as I can.

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Well that's it for today, wish me luck, for tomorrow begins the Summer of Armando!