Tripp-Trapped

NORWAY: LAND of fjords, fish, ferry boats and..... Tripp Trapps. Which, to the uninitiated, are highchairs. But not just any highchairs. Somehow Tripp Trapps, made by the Norwegian firm Stokke, stand like a parental badge of honour in middle-class British kitchens: owning one catapults mums and dads into some kind of super league. Or so I used to feel, strapping Louis into his Ikea hand-me-down while quipping that if we really loved him, he'd have had a Tripp Trapp (rrp £159, excluding the baby bar, cushion, harness, tray, etc etc).

Not so in Norway, where to have a child is to have a Tripp Trapp - or Tripp Trapps when numbers two and three come along. This was something I got to witness at first hand in Alesund, the coastal Art Nouveau gem that just happens to be home to Stokke, when a Norwegian family we met over a Lego session on a rainy Sunday in a local museum ended up inviting us back to their house for dinner. Salmon and Stokkes. Two kids, two Tripp Trapps. 

Indeed, my fact of the trip may just turn out to be that Tripp Trapps are used as standard in Norwegian nurseries. Well, that and the fact that Norwegian mums get something called breastfeeding leave AFTER they return to work: for ten months they can spend two hours of their working day nursing, meaning they get to arrive an hour later and leave an hour earlier each day. And that's after taking ten months off at full pay (or 12 months at 80 per cent). I shudder to imagine what Tripp Trapps round a table at a London nursery would do to the fees (£1,000 minimum per month compared with £320 maximum in Norway). 

Norwegians, it seems, just suck up the cost of stocking up with Stokkes. Perhaps because they don't seem terrible value in a country where a beer and fish snack at an Oslo street market costs £20. Or I guess they may just love their kids more. It goes without saying that my top interview to date is Mr Tripp Trapp himself, aka Peter Opsvik, who designed the chair back in 1972. Be still my beating aspirational mummy heart! No prizes for guessing my souvenir of choice were we actually driving our Volvo estate back to London. 

Snow joke

ASIDE FROM Daddy daycare (Pappi playtime?), living the Scandi dream for kids means swapping an indoor existence for an outdoor one. And I don’t just mean frolicking about on lakeside beaches when it’s sunny. No, Nordic babies toughen up from birth by taking all of their naps outside, even in winter. If Pappi wants to warm up with a coffee, he leaves the sprog in buggy outside the café. This continues at nursery where toddlers play and nap outside in anything down to minus 10C.

The trick is in the clothing, for as the old Russian saying goes: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes.” To be fair, this meant in “olden times”, to coin Louis’s phrase, children pretty much sat out winter, snoozing their way through the long, dark days in countryside cabins because their home knitwear wasn’t up to the task. But it was all change in the 1970s when Polarn O Pyret, the iconic stripy Swedish kidswear brand, hit the scene with its durable, weatherproof overalls and trousers.

This made the Nordic feminist revolution a happy triumvirate of working women, warm children, and proliferating nurseries, which expanded rapidly from the early 1970s to give mums somewhere to dump their kids. Indeed, Polarn’s MD, Maria Oqvist, told me the main reason the company churned out so much outerwear was so Scandi mothers could earn a crust happy in the knowledge that their children were snug. Not to mention stylishly clothed.

Given our camping plans and northern European summer weather, I figured I’d need to waterproof both boys before setting off. As it’s annoyingly cheaper to buy Scandi in London than shop locally this meant a trip to the Polarn concession in House of Fraser rather than a fun shop in situ. Having the right gear somewhat eased the pain of driving into winter as we clocked up the kilometers north. But I somehow still managed a walk in a Roros blizzard, in JUNE, with both small people woefully underdressed because I’d forgotten to pile on the layers. You can take a mum out of London......

Scandequality - by Daddy J

NOT QUITE 48 hours into our trip and we’d already been offered the forest sauna. Two days after that Sweden douze-pointed it to Eurovision glory. So by the time it got to Monday morning in Stockholm we were on a hatrick for national stereotypes. Safe to say what’s drawn us to Scandinavia isn’t the chance to sit starkers in a hot room or reach euro-disco nirvana. For work-life tightropers like ourselves it's the idea of Scandinavia as Mecca for gender-bending metro parenting that really thrills. It was time to take to the equality streets.

Having lunched in a suitably trendy deli in suitably trendy Sodermalm I thought I was in the perfect spot to find kindred daycare Dads when Working Mum left us to go bag an interview. When the time comes to write the guidebook on hipster playgrounds the one on Nyagatan will be right up there, but even so I was the only Dad there for at least 30 minutes and when one did turn up he was American. So much for Scandequality.

By the time we caught up with WM at the Nordiska Museum, Boy 2 who'd been peaky overnight had taken a worrying turn for the worse and so did our pretence at Modern Parenting when it fell to Mum to jump in a cab in search of a doctor post-puke.

That left me and Boy 1 killing time in a museum dedicated to Swedish folk history. Among the empty exhibition halls we did find other Dads out with their kids at last – perhaps they knew better than to take a sickly infant to an outdoor playground in the chill of a Nordic May. So for a brief hour or so we lived the genderless parenting dream cruising exhibitions on dolls houses and interior design. Male bonding, Scandi-style.

The car's the star

As taken by Louis

ASK THE soon-to-be four year old about his trip highlights and barely a few days in I know what they’ll feature. The car. Or, to be precise, “the Vol-vo car” as he calls it. And who could blame him. Not only is the car a joy - even for a passenger a four-hour stint zips by - but a session on the open road affords the perfect opportunity to cross several stereotypes off the master checklist.

First up has to be conformity, from the number of fellow Vol-vo drivers out there, to their absolute dedication to conform to what is expected of them on the roads. Chiefly, sticking to the speed limit. Even when it’s set at an absurdly low 80km/hr on a deserted road north that passes through never-ending forests. And never over-taking, not even when crawling after a log carrier for kilometer after kilometer after kilometer.

Brushing 110km/hr on the motorway (speed limit 100km/hr) west out of Gothenburg instantly earned us the raised eyebrows and a glare from a motorbike-riding policeman, who just happened to pull up along side us.

Then there’s the nagging voice of Vol-vo, which butts in to interrupt your driving reveries if your attention so much as falters for a second. Cross the dotted white lines between lanes without indicating and it will beep: “Don’t do that, don’t do that, don’t that”. Get too close to the car in front and the engine will slow down for you, and as for swerving, momentarily, into the hard shoulder: an image of a coffee cup flashes up on the dashboard, warning: “Driver alert, take a break.” If only it could brew up a cup on the spot.

Ultimately the lack of speeding underlines Swedes’ rationality: it’s bonkers to risk one’s life for the sake of arriving somewhere five minutes earlier. Or not at all, if all goes wrong. But mankind isn’t designed to be rational, especially not when cosseted inside the comforting frame of a Vol-vo car.

Not that Louis is fussed about national stereotypes. He mainly likes the electric windows, and the button on the key that lifts the boot automatically. Not forgetting “speaky lady”, the authoritative voice of the in-built GPS that must have saved countless marriages the world over by taking the rap for dodgy directions. I guess kids just defer to authority, much like the Swedes, or so it seems. 

Land of the Midnight Sons

EXCUSE THE (London-based) hiatus, but babies who brunch is back, for a while at least. After surviving our three-month stint in Jerusalem, life back home seemed a little tame, so we've headed up to Scandinavia to eke a few more adventures out of my maternity leave with a Nordic roadtrip. For once, Daddy J isn't working: instead, he's making like a Scandi pappa and has taken some time off unpaid.


Our six-week trip will take in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, starting and ending in Gothenburg, where we're picking up a Volvo, naturally. In true Borgen fashion (for non-Scandi TV obsessives, that's the one about the Danish mum-cum-PM, this time I'm the one working. If you call traveling round, visiting cool places "work". (Although with two small kids in tow, it really is....) I'm writing a big magazine piece about why Brits love Scandinavia so much. Unless it's just me, which I don't think it can be considering Britain awarded the Swedish Eurovision winner Loreen the full 12 points the other night.

With two non-sleepers along for the ride, Scandinavia is proving less the land of the midnight sun, and more the land of the midnight sons. Did anyone say "fika"*?
*Scandi for coffee and cake