Last week I didn’t write a post. This is because, like many of you, I am in the depths of the summer holiday. 6 weeks of freedom from routine and the humdrum of school and nursery life. For a lot of families this means the excitement of holidays in far flung places (or at least before Covid), lazy mornings and meeting friends. For most parents it’s a bit of a drag to entertain your youngling(s) throughout the time and wishing that flights were cheaper. If you have a fae child, however, it can be 6 weeks of meltdowns, tantrums, and frustration. They have just lost their regular daily routine, which is their safety net, overnight. This world of freedom robs them of many certainties they relied on. They can become very unsure, and this makes their behavior harder to manage.
My daughter is normally the happiest little thing you have ever seen, but for the past week she has run me ragged. I have tried to keep with her regular morning and bedtime routine, but inevitably there has been disruption. Firstly, her childminder hours have been reduced, she now goes twice a week rather than every weekday. She doesn’t understand why she doesn’t see the same friends there, as some are on holiday, and some are simply busy. Her grandparents came to visit – which for myself and my husband was a relief but, despite how much she loves seeing them it comes with a whole level of change. She thoroughly enjoyed her time with them, but after two days, she just wanted to hide in her room and cuddle on her bed all afternoon. It was important to her that either my husband or myself was with her, but we weren’t to interact with her, nor her games. It’s a difficult balance between supporting and smothering.
She has needed more sleep than normal to cope with the upheaval. We have had to reintroduce nap time, and she has been sleeping later in the morning – a real benefit, at least for us! Her eating has improved too: we had a ‘lightbulb’ moment where she would steal chips from my plate whilst ignoring the ones on hers. It finally occurred to us: the difference was that I had added salt to mine. So, in complete indifference to all known health advice, I started adding salt to her food. My husband also realized that all her food was, at best, lukewarm rather than hot; again, because I did start with the best of intentions on feeding my daughter the correct way. It turns out if you serve her lava with some salt on it, she will eat it. Who’da thunk?
Still, it is only the second week in August and I am fretting about school uniforms, pencil cases and book bags. I believe this must be a displacement activity, as every morning I wake up with a moment of blind panic about what we are going to do that day. So far I am trying to keep some semblance of normality, we go out in the morning and let her burn off the manic, and then chill out at home. We got her a new bike – her first with pedals (sidenote: teaching a non-verbal child to ride a bike is like some sort of bizarre game of charades with added metal contrivances). She spends the afternoons oscillating between being on her new bike and pleading to be allowed on her new bike.
This leads me to my current position, cooling down in my new gym’s café whilst trying to stave off a heart attack having worked out for the first time in four years. This is not penance but pragmatism; if she’s on a pedal bike, I’d better be fit enough to catch her on mine!
How’s everyone else’s summer going?
Raising the Modern Fae 