I can't speak for other countries, but both parents cannot take parental leave at the same time in Norway. Some choose to use vacation days while the other parent has parental leave, but it's a fair assumption to make that one of the parents were working while the other was on parental leave.

In Sweden, most of the paternity leave is one at a time, but both are taking care of the child during the first two weeks.

Because that's what most fathers do...

Also they just finished their pappaperm which they said was 133 days over the summer and that means their child likely started in nursery in August or September as is the child's legal entitlement if they were born before August last year or in September last year...

I get that you did something different but the OP's case really does sound like they did what most Norwegian fathers do... (I'm not knocking it because that time was truly special for me.)

Fair enough I didn't know Norway disallowed parallel leave. The way we did it is normal in Germany at least among my social circle.

But I also think that aside from not sleeping at night (which depending on if the mother breastfeeds the father may not be able to help much with anyway) the first few months before the kid starts crawling are actually easier than the subsequent few years. For us it was mostly about spending that special time together as a family.

Correct, we did use our (combined) 10 weeks of vacation to create overlap though.