For the umpteenth time, I drag my two-year old daughter up the pulkabacka, or sledge hill, a mound in my local park which is entirely ignored apart from on the few days it snows, when it becomes a mass of whizzing toddlers. It's just after 3pm on a Wednesday, and the hill is already crowded. But I'm not exactly throwing myself into it. In my head I'm frantically calculating how I can possibly make up for this one hour of unexpected childcare, and still do the work I'm supposed to do, and worrying about when my Swedish wife is going to come and take over, so I can get back to the office.
Until my wife went on maternity leave with our second child in January, Malmö's Folketspark, or Park of the People, was where I'd spent my afternoons, almost without exception, for a year. Just before 3pm, I'd close my laptop and cycle over to my daughter's nursery, or dagis (located in the grim concrete building you see Saga Norén striding towards when she leaves the police station in the Nordic TV thriller The Bridge). And within 20 minutes I'd be at the playground. I'm freelance, so there's no one to stop me spending a year of my life in a couple of scrubby hectares in central Malmö, but most of the other parents I meet in the park have permanent jobs.
My friend Misikir works for the Swedish technology giant Ericsson, Matt for the local Lund University, Aron for an engineering company and Per for E.on, the German power company. These are all serious, demanding employers. And yet, more often than not, they'll be there by 4pm.
"You have these flexible working hours," Misikir tells me about Ericsson's system. "I can come in very early in the morning and leave early, or I can come very late in the day and leave very late. The only thing is that for five hours, between 10am and 3pm, everyone has to be there."
Aron has spent much of last year working two days a week, without a whimper of protest from his boss. "I honestly don't understand how having a kid could possibly work if both parents had inflexible employers," he says. Looking to the UK, I know the answer. The mother stops working for at least a year, after which she returns to work part-time, often in a different, less demanding job. The pattern is depressingly similar for almost every couple I know.
It's the part of Sweden's family support system that is most often overlooked. Yes, there's the generous 480 days of parental leave per child, paid for by government at 80% of salary. Yes, there's the heavily subsidised daycare, which costs me and my wife 1,400 kronor (£130) a month, about a quarter of what it would cost in the UK. But the system still wouldn't work without the flexibility of employers and the commitment most Swedish men and women have to sharing parenting more equally.
Aron believes dividing work and childcare the Swedish way works. "You can do the family thing, but then you can get a bit of a break and go to work two days a week; it makes that pretty fun too." Personally, though, I find the reduction in the time I can spend working intensely frustrating, particularly when, as on Wednesday, it comes unexpectedly. "You said it was important to you that she goes tobogganing, and you said yourself this might be the only day this year," my wife said on the phone as she wheedled me into it.
But the same happens whenever my daughter is ill. Her dagis demands one of us collects her whenever she has so much as a sniffle, and more often than not then refuses to take her the next day, citing the need for a fever-free day.
As I was finishing off this article, I was suddenly called home because my wife was struggling to dress our increasingly recalcitrant two-year-old at the same time as caring for our new five-week-old baby, and wanted me to break off for half an hour to take her to daycare.
According to Dr Leah Ruppanner, a sociologist at Melbourne University, I'm not alone. In Blurred Boundaries, a study she published last October, Ruppanner found that Swedish men were more than four times as likely as British fathers to report that their families conflict with their work lives. "There's a big cultural dialogue on gender equality which doesn't happen in the UK, and one of the consequences is that men don't get off the hook as easily," she says. "If your kid is sick, you might have to go and pick it up."
And while Swedish men expect to slow-pedal their careers for a few years, for me, with a British male work ethic, seeing my income plummet and opportunities sail away has taken some getting used to.
"Men in Sweden are probably experiencing what working women and mothers have always experienced," Ruppanner argues. Indeed, according to her study, British mothers have it tougher than I do. They are more than six times as likely to report family-to-work conflict as British fathers.
About 70% of British mothers are in paid work, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, not a world away from the 80% who work in Sweden. But says Ruppanner, many British women are forced to shift to flexible, part-time work when they have children. "The Scandinavian model seems to be pretty consistent full-time work for women," she says. "But in the British and US model, you work a lot, and then when you have a kid, you reduce your work and then when your kids are school age, you come back. But after five years your job might no longer be there."
Over the coming decade, Britain looks likely to move closer to the Swedish model, with Swedish-style shared parental leave promised for next year (albeit not paid for by the state) and even the prospect of universal subsidised daycare if Labour wins the next election.
But I don't think British employers are ready for the cultural shift that is needed to make it work. I can't see many British companies letting their workers, particularly their male ones, leave the office at 3pm, or take the day off with no warning whenever their children are sick or have a doctor's appointment.
Similarly I can't see British men making the shift. When I lose hours to emergency childcare, I struggle to make them up in the evening, because after I get my daughter to bed around nine, I then have to do my share of the cleaning.
According to an earlier study by Ruppanner, Swedish women are much more likely to report conflict with their spouses over housework than British women are and that's because they demand more. If a man claims to help with the housework, as I've occasionally made the mistake of doing, it marks him out as an unreformed sexist. Housework is supposed to be shared.
Men in Sweden spend on average half an hour longer each day cooking, cleaning and caring than men in the UK, according to OECD statistics. Still rather than being a drag on productivity, people in Sweden tend to see the system as an advantage. It prevents the nation's expenditure on women's education and the expertise they've accumulated over their careers from going to waste. It also helps recruit and retain workers.
"There is an impact on the company in the short term in terms of productivity, but in the long term it really pays off," says Harry Duque, a Venezuelan who works for Ericsson. "Employees are happier when they get these kinds of benefits. I appreciate this a lot. It's one of the reasons I stay committed to my company."
Duque took an unusually long nine months of parental leave without anyone from Ericsson batting an eyelid.
I've certainly been less productive over the last two years and that can be frustrating, but I suspect that in the future I'll treasure the memories of the times I've spent with my daughter splashing in the plunge pool, riding on the park's £2-a-go ponies or even dragging her "again, again Pappa" on her toboggan up the sledge hill.