When Nana and Grandad visit, a familiar rhythm descends. They coo over the size of their grandkids and render them delirious with biscuits you can only buy in Ireland. When the kids head off to school and nursery respectively, we work while they potter around downstairs, and reconvene for long, chatty lunches of the traditional variety: ham, salads, sliced beetroot, fresh bread and hard-boiled eggs, which we eat while they list everyone from home who’s died since we last saw them.
We like to think we keep a clean and tidy home, but a visit from Marian and Sean quickly disabuses of this notion. There are only so many times you can see someone cleaning your taps before you realise you might be doing it more frequently yourself. ‘Do you know who else died?’ Marian will say, while scrubbing the underside of a pan I’ve never seen before in my life, ‘Dympna, from the hairdressers – a terrible fall.’
This visit, however, they will have an even more important role: minding our kids by themselves for three days, while we fly off to Ireland for a wedding. It’s the latest in a series of moves designed to loosen the apron strings slightly. A few weeks ago, we moved our daughter into the bunkbed she now shares with her brother, he on top, she on bottom. This, we hoped, would be a speed ramp toward more ordered sleeping, and transition her from glowering, sleep-averse toddler, to a more manageable adult child.
When he was her age, our son took to getting his own bed with relish, lovingly decking it out with cuddly toys and showing it to any visitors we had. He would proudly beam about his new ‘big boy bed’ to random pedestrians and any delivery men who called.
Our daughter, however, was less moved when her turn came. She approached her bunk with queasy apprehension, grimacing like Paris Hilton being shown the earthen-floor Alabama pig shack that will serve as her pretend home for an episode of The Simple Life.
Eventually, we managed to get her to clamber in – which she did as if her duvet was lined with rat pelt – and we quickly discovered that her torturous 45-minute sleep routine had now ballooned to 90. Weeks later, it’s anyone’s guess if she’ll go down at all. It’s this that makes palming her off to my in-laws difficult, since that’s a lot to ask of anyone.
If they’re fazed by this, they don’t let on, even as the nights before we leave descend into bedtime strops and shrieks. They tell us not to worry as we pack and offer insultingly detailed childcare instructions to people who’ve been parents for half a century. By the end, we’re reminding them how keys work. At time of writing, we’re about to take off, so I don’t know how things will go. The worry is they won’t get a minute’s sleep for the next 72 hours, and once we return they’ll never speak to us again. And then how would we hear who’s died back home?
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