Two hours forty each way, three nights, four times a year, since Nell was one.
There is a version of this note that is about logistics and there’s a version that is about my mother, and I’m going to try to do both, because separating them would be dishonest.
The cot goes up first
Before the coats are off. Before anybody sits down and is offered a cup of tea and the whole afternoon dissolves.
The reason is not organisation, it’s that a travel cot which has been standing in the corner of a room since two o’clock is furniture by seven, and a travel cot which is assembled at half past six in front of an interested three-year-old is a toy, and he will be in and out of it for forty minutes.
Also: it has not fitted where it fitted last time. Twice. Something moves in that room between visits and nobody can tell me what.
The routine travels
Same sleeping bag, even in June. Same book. Same three sentences.
I used to think the problem was that the room was unfamiliar, and I’d try to fix the room — the nightlight, the curtains, the door at the right angle. It helps a bit. What helps much more is that the sequence is identical, because a sequence is portable and a room is not.
Masking tape lives in the bag now. It has held a rattling wardrobe door shut, closed a two-inch gap in a curtain, and stopped a cupboard swinging open. That wardrobe door has come open at two in the morning on every visit since 2021 and my mother is genuinely baffled by this, as she does not sleep in that room.
The first night
There is no fix for the first night.
We spent about three years looking for one and I now think looking for one made it worse, because it turned an ordinary bad night into a series of failed interventions and a low argument on a landing at half eleven.
It’s a cost. It’s written into the trip. We go up expecting to be up, one of us takes it, and the second night is almost always fine — and by the third he sleeps better than he does at home, which nobody has ever explained to me.
Her house
We don’t childproof it.
I thought about asking, the first year, and then thought about what that actually is: asking a woman in her seventies to take the ornaments off her own shelves for three nights, four times a year, so that we don’t have to watch our own child. She would do it. That’s why it would be wrong to ask.
So we watch him instead, which is much more tiring, and which is the right way round. The exceptions are the two things that are actually dangerous rather than inconvenient — her tablets, and the gate at the top of those stairs — and those got one specific conversation each, years ago, and were sorted in an afternoon.
The thing about being asked
She asks what she can do. Every visit, usually while I’m doing something with my hands.
For years I said “nothing, you’re fine”, which I meant kindly and which left her standing in her own kitchen with nothing to do while her daughter was visibly busy. It is not a generous answer. It just sounds like one.
Now I say a specific thing. Take him into the garden for twenty minutes. Do the bath. Read the second book. She is delighted every time, and I get twenty minutes, and I cannot account for why it took me nine years to work out that “how can I help” is a question with an answer.
Things people email to ask
- How do you get a toddler to sleep in a travel cot?
- Bring the routine, not the room. The same sleeping bag, the same book and the same words in the same order do more than anything about the cot itself, because what a child is tracking is the sequence rather than the surroundings. Put the cot up early in the day so it stops being a novelty by bedtime, and expect the first night to be bad regardless.
- Why does the first night away always go badly?
- Because everything is new at once, and there is no version of the evening that fixes that. We stopped trying — the first night is written off, we go up expecting to be up, and the second night is almost always fine. Treating it as a failure rather than as a fixed cost made it worse, mostly for us.
- Should grandparents childproof their house?
- We decided not to ask. It is their house, they live there the other fifty weeks of the year, and rearranging it for a three-night visit puts the cost of our children onto them. We watch him more closely instead, which is more tiring and is the correct trade. Anything genuinely dangerous — medicines, the stair gate — is worth one specific conversation rather than a general audit.
- What should you pack for a few nights at the grandparents'?
- Keep a bag that stays packed between visits: sleeping bag, spare bedding, the comfort object, calpol and a syringe, a plug-in nightlight, and a roll of masking tape, which sounds odd and has fixed a rattling door, a curtain gap and a cupboard latch. Everything else can be bought or borrowed; those cannot, at eleven at night, in a village.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
Presents for people who live two hours away
We see my parents perhaps eight times a year, and for a long time our presents were an attempt to make up the difference — bigger, posted, apologetic. The thing that helped was giving something that produced phone calls instead of parcels.
Two hours forty, with everybody
The drive to my parents’ takes two hours forty without children. With two children and a fourteen-year-old dog it takes three and a half, and the extra fifty minutes are entirely under our control, which is the annoying part.
Presents for people who say they don’t want presents
My mum has said “don’t get me anything” every year since about 2011. For a decade I treated that as a politeness to be worked around, and bought her nice versions of things she already owned, and she thanked me properly every time.
Comments
They’re open, but they go through me first — every one is read and approved by hand, which is slow and occasionally very slow. Email is the fastest route, and I answer most of them.
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