A fellow blogger here in Copenhagen recently posted on this Danish phenomenon – fresh air babes. I still get the giggles at it but it’s really part of childhood here.
While in Australia at the first sign of a grey cloud or dropping temperature sends people scurrying indoors – particularly those with newborns - here in Denmark, parents believe there’s nothing like a kip in the great outdoors, whatever the weather. Seriously. And it does get cold here, believe it or not.
Consequently, at any time of the day you can see prams in gardens or on balconies, in any weather. They breed ‘em tough here in the big DK.
So, when NQDII called me from another room yesterday saying, ‘Come and have a look at this’, I couldn’t resist taking a quick snap of a slumbering bub in the back yard.
3 comments:
SEE???? SEE WHAT I MEAN????? This still freaks me out, and I've been here a year and a half! Of course, the cold, cold air seems pretty intense for little baby lungs, but it's the kidnapping potential that gets this paranoid American mind racing fearfully. I guess a Danish baby has never been taken from one of those before... Don't you be the first to test it out, okay?
Who would want to steal a baby? That's the question I was answered with.
So, soon to be mother, let's not even go there. That's what makes Denmark so special and so unlike those 'bad' places we come from.
Honestly, I feel like wrapping Denmark up (even though some things do annoy me) and saying, "Don't ever change. Don't ever change'. I mean, where else can you go shopping and leave your baby outside the shop and not worry about social services putting you behind bars or some idiot kidnapping it???
If it's any consolation, an Irish girl I work with said she'd *never* let her at-the-time unborn bubba alone outside a shop but after I while, once he arrived, she said the idea sorta grew on her... :)
Just don't be like my mother. She left me outside the shop in a pram the week she brought me home and then went back to the house, (once she'd bought whatever it was she bought) - without me!
Leaving babies outside in the air was quite common in the UK right up to, at least,the 60s. I left my *second* child outside a shop and forgot to pick him up when I left -- I was in another shop across the street when I remembered him and ran back in a panic. I've always thought that was interesting, that I never did it with my first! Now, of course, no-one in their right mind would leave a baby outside a shop, apart from the baby getting stolen, you'd probably be arrested!
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