Things travelling and stay home parenthood have in common

Modern Mothercraft strongly advises against travelling with young children unless absolutely necessary. In fact, it proclaims "it should be avoided as far as possible" for reasons including change of routine, "digestive upset", and infection from crowds. It also strongly advises against train travel if possible, noting that planes are "usually quite safe".* 

I love travelling. Before having children, my husband and I spent many a happy time wandering around far-flung locations armed with guide books, backpacks, and ugly-yet-practical shoes. Now we have kids, we've only been two holidays that didn't involve staying with extended family.  While I'm sure that travel is much easier now than it would have been in 1945, it's still harder than before kids. The closest I have gotten to real travel recently is looking at other people's pictures on Facebook.

I have been thinking, though, about how there is a lot that stay-home parenthood and travelling actually have in common.  Perhaps I have too much time on my hands as a stay home mum, and perhaps I am grasping at straws in a deluded fashion, but here are ten things I've come up with:

1. Sleep deprivation.  Jet lag wakes you at odd hours, and we had many an early morning to catch a bus, plane or train. So, it's just like now with a toddler.and a newborn!

2. Sleeping in odd uncomfortable places. An airport floor while waiting for an early flight. A toddler's bed when they can't sleep on a stormy night. The discomfort of an Indian slat bed. The discomfort of the aforementioned toddler deciding my pillow is just the place for his feet when the storm does lull him to sleep. Exactly the same!

3. Being hassled. When travelling, I was often hassled to buy a person's wares, or to give them money, or to ride in their taxi/auto rickshaw/tuk tuk. Now I'm hassled to put on Peppa Pig and provide a never ending supply of Tiny Teddies.

Epic fail at the ideal routine for toddlers

Today, I tried to follow Mothercraft's suggested routine for a toddler. Here's how I got on, with the book's recommendations in bold:

6 - 7.30: Wakens, goes to toilet, has drink of fruit juice or water. Given a shower, dresses, cleans teeth.

Wakens - check. Has drink of fruit juice or water - fail. I didn't give my son either. Especially juice. Recommendation leaves me wondering if 1945 children spent mornings bouncing off walls if given juice before breakfast. Shower - fail. Cleans teeth - fail. At this point I feel slightly disheartened that the only recommendation I've managed is that my toddler woke up, and I can hardly take credit for that myself. 

8am: Breakfast. Bowel evacuation. Washes hands.

Again, an epic fail on my part. My toddler had breakfast of course, but I didn't do the other two. I did have a scoff, though, at the phrase "bowel evacuation", and wonder when it became normal to say "poo". I also started to feel better about failing the first part of the day's recommendations when I realised it suggests that teeth be cleaned before breakfast. Huh. 

On exposing children to the sun

Like any other child of the 80s, especially one that grew up in New Zealand, the 'slip slop slap' message regarding the sun is second nature to me. Before we go into the sun, I do my best* to get the kids to slip on a hat, slop on some sunscreen, and slap ... I can't remember what the slap was. Maybe it was slap on a hat and slip on something else.  Spilled sunscreen, perhaps?  Hmmmm. Well, details aside, it's the sentiment that counts - keep your kids out of the sun. The sun here is nasty. Melanoma rates are high, and being burnt is really sore. And if the random old lady that yelled at me from her car recently to tell me that part of my baby was in the sun is anything to go by, these ideas are fairly mainstream. Although I wouldn't recommend yelling the advice to a harried mother from a car as your communications medium unless you want a glare of doom, but that's a whole other rant. 

"Summer-time frolics"

The idea of sun awareness wasn't around in 1945. In fact, sunbathing is recommended for your children, every day. This sun bathing ought to proceed as follows: "commence by exposing the limbs to direct sunshine, then expose the chest for a few minutes, and finally expose the whole body." Mothercraft notes that children who stay in the sun all day may become "overheated", but sun bathing is "so good for us all." 

Now, I do get the benefit of Vitamin D, and don't want my children to be Vitamin D deficient. There is speculation that children aren't getting enough Vitamin D, and studies show that Vitamin D supplements don't work. So, the sun it is. But, I really don't want to un-slip slop slap either, let alone sun-bathing every day. As someone who grew up being made aware of the dangers of the sun, especially the risks of skin cancer, making my kids sunbathe feels counter-intuitive. My children's exposure to the sun is not in the middle of the day, and always under a layer of sun screen. Not to mention the fact that the weather here is pants at present to recently a sun-bath would be more akin to a nasty, cold shower, so not something to be done daily anyway. 

So, I think this is some advice I'm going to ignore. Like the advice on how to give an enema, some of the tidbits contained within Modern Mothercraft really are truly dated. 

*Sadly, a certain toddler likes to throw hats sometimes, rather than wear them. Not sure what the authors of Mothercraft would say about that one. 

Buggies

Modern Mothercraft says prams should be made of wood and wicker, lined with American cloth. And when children can sit, they should go in something like this:

This section of the book makes me respect my grandmothers. I don't imagine that buggy is terribly light to push, not like my Mountain Buggy. Even the double Mountain Buggy I spend my days trudging around the suburbs behind looks easier to push. And the tantrums! If the toddlers of today can get so upset about their comfy modern prams, I wonder how the toddlers of yesteryear coped. I know lots of people may look down their noses and comment that in their day that pram would have been a luxury that no toddler would have ever objected to as it was preferable to walking six miles in the snow with barbed wire for shoes, but I'm certain the odd baby boomer would still have cried blue murder at being put inside.

As an aside, does anyone know what American cloth is without Googling it? Although to be honest even Googling it myself I'm still not certain what it actually is. All I can say with certainty is that it's not in my buggy!