To leave DC's with in-laws so DP and I can have a weekend away?

[snowchic83]

DD1 will be 21 months and DD2 will be 3 months. DP and I are thinking about a weekend away in the Lake District at the beginning of October. His parents have offered to look after the DC's which I am completely happy about as they are great GP's and the girls love them. We are thinking of leaving on the Friday and coming back on the Monday.

Would you leave your baby for the weekend at 3 months (she is FF)? I am also worried that DD1 will wonder where we are and get upset and I hate the thought of her missing us (she as stayed with the ILs a few times overnight and been absolutely fine but 24 hours is a bit different to 3 days).

I have the booking open on anther tab just waiting for me to click but I feel v guilty about it and can't quite bring myself to go ahead!

Am I being over anxious about this? Should I just go ahead and book?

WWYD?

Nothing I've said implies that motherhood is unimportant, an accident of biology or no big deal.

But I don't accept that mothers (and therefore women) are the only people that babies feel happiest and safest around, which is what you said in your earlier post.

That might have been true for your babies but it wasn't the case for mine. As babies cannot speak, we can only judge how they feel by their behaviour, so in terms of observable behaviour there were times when mine seemed happier in my presence, times when they seemed happier with my husband or their grandparents and times when there were no noticeable changes in their receptiveness regardless of who they were with.

As someone else said upthread, it is fine to state what it was/is like for your babies, accepting that there has to be a lot of interpreting of behaviour for you to be able to make that judgement.

What's not fine is to say it's true for every baby because self-evidently you can't know that.

As for fathers not minding being away from their children because they aren't the primary caregivers, there's a whole other thread about why mothers and women tend to be the primary caregivers, but I think to ignore the guilt-tripping that's aimed at women and mothers and not at men, is to miss out a large part of the context.

Everything you've said implies that.

You minimise the importance of women to their own children and then tell them that that is feminism.

I don't think it is sexist to think that babies feel safer and happier with their mothers around. In fact I think the attempt to deny the importance of a mother's bond with her baby and the baby's dependence on her can be sexist.

It is so very sexist.

Babies are not dependant on their mothers, they are dependant on care - in your family you provided that care so your babies became dependant on you.

In my family it was provided by a range of people - predominantly my OH but significantly his grandparents, so can be left and remain happy and healthy and unaffected on his return.

Perhaps had I been well enough to 'mother' him in the first few months he might had created some dependence on me, but it is learnt behaviour, not instinctive and so long as a baby is warm and fed they don't care who is doing the clothing/feeding.

The question of leaving a child is more for the caregivers well being - if they can cope with being away from their baby

My babies didn't "become" dependent on me.

There were born that way.

The first thing they did after they were born was to seek out sustenance from my breasts.

That was instinctive, not learnt.

Of course if I had been unwell, or had died, or was unable to care for them someone else could have stood in. And with the help of modern wonders such as formula, they could have kept the baby healthy and alive without me.

But the primary source of food and comfort for them from the time they were taken from my womb was me. Was my body. Because I am their mother.

Er, I said nothing about feminism

It's not about minimising the importance of women to their own children.

It's about not exaggerating that importance, to the exclusion of fathers and other caregivers, or assuming that in every family, the primary caregiver has to be a child's mother.

How strange that you keep putting words into my mouth.

join I'm knackered! Haven't stayed up that late in a looooong time.