Home Alone but Not Quite

My first plane trip was from Dublin to the Isle of Man at the age of nine. This was back in the day when airlines charged for tickets but not luggage and on-board refreshments. This was in 1980 when flying was still quite a posh thing to do. The week before our departure my mother took me to the doctor with stomach pains which were explained away as pre-flight nerves. It was an early indicator of the connection between my brain and my gut which acts like an increasingly active anxiety metre as I grow older. No such troubles for my offspring I’m glad to report despite that fact that I inherited my stomach-churning worry mechanism from my own parents.

My girls flew to Denmark with my husband yesterday to visit their Danish relatives. Pre-flight jitters were non-existent. Instead there were comments something along the lines of: oh do we really have to go on a plane? (the implication being that this was a dead boring thing to do), oh why do we have to get a train to the airport (how tedious). I guess that's what you get when you take your first flight out of Singapore at eight weeks and four weeks respectively, and have only just adjusted to the fact that planes on short-haul journeys do not have in-built entertainment systems.

Anyway they arrived safely without incident (or toothbrushes, thanks to my negligent packing) leaving me alone with toddler boy - or the the Little Dictator as I affectionately think of him. So I’m enjoying – I use the term lightly - spending two days exclusively with a person who points to everything repeatedly, says its name and expects to be mimicked, repeatedly. He also likes to grab my hand and show me things – dee? dee? dee? – repeatedly. And then there are his constant demands for me to sit down – tit dowen – but not in front of the computer. Other than when the Little Dictator is sleeping, we haven't been more than a centimetre apart since the rest of the clan abandoned us. I truly am blessed, I know. He’s asleep now, but not for long. Better dash. He'll be shouting for his daddy any minute.