What a crazy few weeks it has been. My husband and and I took our first solo trip without the Elephant, the Elephant turned the big O-N-E, and we took a family trip across the pond to meet up with friends. Not to tackle everything at once, I will start at the beginning – going away without the Elephant.
Parents leave children behind all the time. Yup. This is true. However, it was a first for us to get on a plane without her. My husband had surprised me with a bucket list item for my birthday that I couldn’t refuse – tickets to see Garth Brooks in Las Vegas. But it meant that I had to get on a plane and fly to an entirely different country WITHOUT my Elephant. EEK! So I solicited advice from friends and read the internet. The combination of the two left me relatively well equipped to deal with leaving the Elephant behind. Here is a list of the top five things that helped me to leave our Elephant behind:
Important Information: this may seem like a no brainer, but something that I’ve realized in the technology world we now live in is that I often forget to leave paper copies of things or write things down. A few important pieces of information that we left behind were the Elephant’s health care card, details of our insurance, our family doctor, and a signed medical consent form should anything happen while we were away. We are fortunate that in Canada our insurance isn’t as big of an issue, but we still wanted to be prepared. The medical information we left is similar to what is found here: http://www.childrenshospitalofillinois.org/pdfs/patients-and-family/medical-concent-form-eng.pdf
We also left her passport as we were travelling to the USA and wanted to be careful in the event that something happened and she needed to get to us.
Trial Run – it goes without saying to get someone you trust to watch your child. We are fortunate to have grandparents who watch the Elephant regularly and know her schedule. They are also more than happy to stay at our house so the Elephant has her regular bed. We did a trial run a few weeks prior when our good friends got married at a hotel nearby. We stayed at the hotel and the grandparents watched the Elephant overnight. We were only about 15 minutes away so it gave us peace of mind. It also helped us for when went further and for longer.
Talk About It: even though the Elephant likely had no clue what I was saying, I talked to her regularly about how mommy and daddy were going away and that Grandma and Grandpa would be watching her. She likely didn’t give two hoots, but I think it helped me to feel better.
No Face Time: this is something that I learned when my husband and I watched a friend’s son prior to having the Elephant. The second mama sees baby and baby sees mama on Face Time (or Skype or your technology of choice), it’s game over. It rarely ends well and everyone just ends up in tears. I preferred to look at pictures and receive updates that everyone was having fun.
Just Go: timing will never be perfect. You will never eliminate the guilt. But go. You deserve it. I tried to keep myself busy so I wouldn’t constantly be thinking about the Elephant. Fortunately it was Vegas so keeping busy wasn’t that difficult!
I’m sure there are hundreds of other things to consider…this is just my experience. One of the best parts of the trip was coming home to see the biggest Elephant grin when we got to hug each other again.
The Elephant's Trunk 