This weekend we’re going to visit my mum. Regular readers will be aware of how much I loathe and detest the town I lived in from April 1983 until I left for university. At one point in recent years, I declared I would never go back there unless someone died. In fact what happened was that someone was born, and everything changed.
I do really want to see my mum, and I really want her and Bernard to be able to spend time together. I just hate going to Armpit. My stepdad is now pretty much immobile, so they can never come to see us, so if I want to see them, then I have to go there.
To the non-parent, no doubt this just sounds like miserly grumbling. Parents of toddlers, on the other hand, will probably understand the challenges presented by a 250 mile car journey that has to be undertaken outside of working hours. We have had some success with setting off just before bedtime, but it does seriously disrupt our already precarious sleep patterns, because it is not possible to do a stay-asleep transfer to bed on arrival, sometime around midnight. Oh the mess. Still, if he sleeps later than 4am the next day, that would be a good thing. And a rare thing.
Which leads me on to our sleeping arrangements. Mum “improved” her cottage by changing it from three bedrooms to two. The spare room is just big enough for her computer, the world’s smallest double bed, and a travel cot. There is no room to stand on either side of the travel cot, which is less than comfortable. This will be the first visit when we don’t use it, as Bernard now sleeps in a big boy bed, and is just too heavy to be lifted in and out of the cot. So mum has prepared some sort of camp bed arrangement. I am anxious about this. But maybe it will be fine. Except that there will be no question of any three-in-a-bed arrangement, which is our usual default for Bad Nights.
And then the aforementioned 4am wake-up call. And the aforementioned stepdad, who is up for most of the night because he’s in so much pain, will be in the sitting room at that time feeling miserable. If we go in there, we disturb him. If we stay in the bedroom, we disturb Pete. There isn’t really anywhere else to go. We will have to get dressed and go for a walk or something. At 4am. In Armpit. And getting Bernard dressed is not exactly a peaceful and straightforward activity, so if we do that, we will disturb everyone.
But on the plus side, mum’s a great cook.
That sounds like a bit of a nightmare. Funnily enough my daugher has suddenly started waking up at 5 am. As I can’t make breakfast last any longer than 15 minutes and Tellytubbies (yuck!) doesn’t start till 8.30 am I have to fill in the intervening 3 hours, also without waking the rest of the house. I’ve started taking her out for bike rides at 6.30 am just to give us something to do.
Tomorrow I’m off to visit a friend in England and I’m terrified that she’s going to wake at 4 am (due to the time difference between here and the UK) and wake everyone else up. So I really feel for you.
Does putting him to bed later help him sleep later? I grimace at 5am but 4am would be just completely unacceptable in my house. I’ll happily go in and see the little monster and resettle him but there is just no way I would get up at 4am with him (unless he’s ill) because it just makes me the world’s most grumpiest mummy. He can stay and yell himself silly (and he does) but he doesn’t seem to actually get upset for more than a few minutes. I’m not really into letting him cry a lot but 4am is definitely time for being in your bedroom.
Obviously the circumstances at your mum’s are a bit exceptional.