You know the rest, right? ‘… Summer Holiday, / no more working for a week or two. / Fun and laughter on our summer holiday, / no more worries for me or you’…
Well, off we were going on our first Big Trip with Small, and I’ve never been so concerned about the lack of fun/ laughter/ no more worries. It should be fun we know this, to get away, get a change of scene, go somewhere new and lose the old routine for a while. But that’s when you don’t have a child with disabilities. Small thrives on the opposite of all of these, he likes what he knows, and loves a bit of routine. Hell, so do I, and that was before I had kids, but you get the idea. However, Big has been desperate for a proper summer holiday and OH and I felt we needed a break, so book it we did.
We opted for France, a small gite complex where there would be other people for us to talk to and other children for Big to play with and Small to watch. There were definitely some expected and unexpected downsides to this trip. All holidays are expensive, and we’re lucky that we can afford to do it, but Small did his very own best to aid the French economy. We took the ferry over, but booked a berth there and back, just to give us all a little space, and Small somewhere to lie down and have a wriggle as we didn’t want to keep him in his buggy for four hours. Once in France, we had to break the journey there and back as he was never going to manage 6 hours in the car. We booked two rooms in the hotel, not one, so at least someone got a good night’s sleep. Small, generally, sleeps well, but if he wakes up he’ll either chat and thump his feet for hours, or shout and we couldn’t face that with all of us in one room. And the gite we booked had three rooms, not two, as for the same reason, the kids could not share.
And the sleeping…. Small is an ok sleeper. Generally he’ll go to sleep around 7-8pm and get up anywhere between 5 and 7 with possibly a small wake up in the night, but he’ll often just play and go back to sleep. But in the last few weeks this has turned. He’ll either not go to sleep for hours or go to sleep fine, but wake up in the middle of the night and shout. This was exacerbated on holiday. Our neighbours swore they heard nothing, but we felt bad, and often took him out for a drive along the darkest roads in France in the dead of night just to calm him down.
However. We had a wonderful time. I relaxed. OH relaxed. I haven’t seen OH that relaxed in a long long time. Big went feral. It was so lovely to see. And Small thought everything was wonderful. He loved croissants, especially the chocolate ones (that was definitely a ‘more’) and when Big went off splashing in the pool it was very clear he wanted to go too, though my God it was cold! He was happy. We were all happy. Exept at 3 in the morning… driving round French roads… in the dark… without those things you’re supposed to have on the headlights that we’d forgotten…
We’re going to go again next year.
itssmallsworld 