bairn blog: a tale of three henleys

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02:06am Saturday, 5th July 2008

t-minus 2 days…

gethin will be whisked away by uma and oompa on sunday and being his first prolonged trip away from his parents, our original feelings of joy and liberation are slowly getting replaced by nervousness and trepidation. To be honest, we are missing him already – even though he hasn’t gone yet.

gethin has been in our lives pretty much 24-7 since the day he was born, 27 months ago, and whilst i would be the first to say we probably do deserve a break it is hard to imagine what to do of an evening without the wee one (let alone how we will ever manage getting out of bed for work in the mornings!).

we have always strived to raise gethin in a close and loving environment and have worked very hard at being parents first and ourselves second. parenting books such as the dreaded gina – ‘it puts the lotion in the basket’ – ford adorn the libraries of parents throughout the land but the approach of working children around the lives of their parents is one that has never appealed to us, even if it means that our social life is near non-existent.

what then will we do? cinema? fancy meal? nothing? so many options and we have forgotten them all.

the funny thing about packing bairn off for the first time has been compiling the list.

the list outlines the dos, donts and needs; the user manual; the rules for our 2006 model bairn. a guide for the modern grandparent in maintaining and entertaining this little thing that has dominated our lives for so long….for seven whole days.

we have always felt we were quite liberal parents but my god, the list makes us seem quite stringent. 3 pages of favourite toys, agendas, meal suggestions, bedtime protocol and the like. all that’s left to do is compile the bairn phrase book with phoenetic translation of all the gethisms that are elusive to all but the most trained ear.

no doubt both gethin and the grandparents will be fine – it will be great for them all to spend some quality time together and also for gethin to spend some time away from his parents (and us from him). but can’t help but feel that as soon as he is in that foreign land called england we will miss him greatly.