Holi-yay or Holi-nay?

I have spent much of the past week wondering whether we were brave or foolhardy when we booked a holiday to the Finnish wilderness. Many adopters have quickly learned that familiar places and familiar routines equate to smoother breaks with their children, so either return to the same tried and tested venue or go away in their caravan (home on wheels). It is quite possible that those people are wiser than us.

However, as with most aspects of life, we are somewhat prone to doing something different to everybody else and wandering off on our own merry path. On this occasion, that wander led us to deepest, snowiest, most remote Finland. We were so deep into Finland, we could have walked to Russia. There is no real relevance to that fact, apart from to illustrate how remote our location was.

It seemed like a good idea when we booked it.

We’d been to Finnish Lapland before and had an amazing time (see A Magical Adventure? ). Of course it had not gone without hitch, but the life-enhancing experience of seeing The Northern Lights whilst husky-sledding in temperatures of minus twenty-something had obliterated any more minor concerns. The boys crave adventure and I am repelled by any water-based activities, so winter adventures suit us well. We saw this trip, advertised through a reputable company, with amazing reviews, and billed as a ‘family adventure’ and thought it seemed perfect.

However, warning bells rang on arrival, when we discovered there had been a stomach bug in our accommodation the previous week and our arrival would now be delayed due to a ‘deep clean’. Hmm.

Trying not to be paranoid, we got on with it.

The first thing we noted about being on holiday with a new group of twenty or so people, was that Little Bear’s behaviour stood out as different. I suspect it always does, but usually we are with familiar people who know and understand him. Usually the difference doesn’t affect us. But there, with strangers, we were more aware of the transparency of people’s thoughts. ‘What is he doing?’ they thought. ‘Why is he rolling around in the snow when everyone else is standing at the coach stop?’ ‘Why has he wandered off when the guide is explaining the intricacies of husky-husbandry in heavily accented English?’

Again I found myself caught between wanting to enlighten them and wanting to protect Little Bear’s privacy. I said nothing. I attempted to parent as usual.

A big problem, with a holiday such as this, is the impossibility of sticking to familiar routines. It wasn’t self-catering as our UK holidays always are: we were trapped by hotel feeding times. As dinner was at 6pm, the time Little Bear usually begins his bedtime routine, things were bound to be harder than usual. Clearly, it is far from ideal to ask a child who struggles with flexibility, to be flexible about his meal and bedtimes when they are usually very strict with good reason. I suspect the reason we have generally faired quite well on UK breaks is that no matter where we are our familiar routines have anchored us. In Finland, however, we had a tired, hungry and understandably dysregulated bear at points during the first days.

We tried to be resourceful – making sandwiches at breakfast time so that we had more flexibility later on and Little Bear could skip the dining hall altogether if needed. It sounds a bit ridiculous but because Little Bear’s behaviour is so inconsistent, it is difficult to predict and I don’t think we were as good at spotting that this was likely to be a problem in advance as we should have been because there are times when Little Bear would be able to cope with more flexibility.

It is ironic really, that I am becoming a person who is better at solving problems after they’ve occurred than predicting them beforehand, given my propensity towards morbid-thinking. I suspect that in an attempt to be easy-going enough to attempt wilderness holidays, I have had to relax the side of me which anticipates myriad problems. There is certainly a freedom in just dealing with things as and when they occur but the downside is I get to berate myself for not being more prepared.

Anyway, after several nights of lengthy and emotionally challenging bedtimes (a child continually moving and wriggling and verbally scribbling to keep themselves stimulated into wakefulness is nothing if not a little insanity-inducing), we changed our approach. I realised that freedom on the outdoor journey from the dining hall to our room was too difficult for Little Bear at that time of night: he couldn’t cope with the demands to bring himself back inside when we asked, triggering escalation. This was akin to our issues on the school run which have been solved with holding hands and keeping Little Bear close – not putting him in a position where there are any demands – and this worked on holiday too. He was also helped by having his pjs and toothbrush etc. all laid out in the right places for him so he could complete his whole routine without any adult prompts (we agreed to do it that way in advance of dinner). These tweaks led to vastly improved bedtimes.

Although the change in routine wasn’t ideal, there were still solutions available to us. It was good to know that. Even when stranded in the Finnish nowhere, difficulties didn’t have to become crises.

The other mistake we made was forgetting (I know, honestly!) about the need to establish clear new rules in any new place. Little Bear’s bed was up on a mezzanine above ours. We could hear him up there but couldn’t easily see him. Evidently, being away from grown-up eyes meant that Little Bear set his own rules of what was permitted on the mezzanine, none of which were conducive to sleeping. Once I’d figured this out, I realised he would need one of us to provide supervision up there, much like we’d had to do when he was small and made no association between bedtime and sleeping. Like then, he did not appreciate my presence (it curbed his fun no end) and I was insulted, threatened and hit. However, I knew it was important to persevere and not be bullied back downstairs by a six year old. It wasn’t any fun and it took ages but the next night, he lay down and got straight to the business of sleeping.

It was reassuring, in a strange kind of way, that we had enough tools in our portable therapeutic toolbox that we could have a good go at resolving these issues wherever we were (even if they could have been avoided by better forward-planning).

As many people will already know, there were further problems with the holiday, though they couldn’t have been reasonably predicted.

On day three, Grizzly and I both woke up with The Bug. Yes, the one they had supposedly deep-cleaned away. It knocked us both off our feet for the whole day. Clearly this was undesirable.

I have always been very anti-cruises because every time I imagine a huge ship with all those people on board, my first thought, like a weirdo, is of Norovirus. I could envisage a nightmare scenario where everybody gets confined to a tiny cabin, shitting and vomiting, for the duration, and that, my friends, does not sound like fun. Yet here I was, in basically the same scenario, in a snowy forest in Finland.

And yet… I didn’t feel the depths of despair I thought I might. I was grateful Gary was with us to look after the boys and she hadn’t been struck down – yet. It was strangely nice to spend some time with my husband, even though we felt rubbish, and, outside, it was snowing. There could certainly have been worse bedside views.

The next day, we were okay and managed to go on our planned excursion. I was grateful we had bounced back quickly.

By now, Gary was ill and couldn’t join us. With the majority of the wider group dropping around us, this seemed inevitable. While I was sad she was missing out, I was grateful she wasn’t actually sick – things could certainly have been worse.

That night, Little Bear settled well for bed. He’d been asleep half an hour when he awoke vomiting all over his bed. Evidently things were going from bad to worse. He was now in my bed and I was relegated to the mezzanine with its broken light to read my book by torchlight. And yet…

Despite having vomited so much the mattress was beyond salvation, Little Bear’s brown eyes peeped from under my duvet, glinting with mischief, and he launched into an hilarious rendition of Baby Shark. Of course I didn’t want any of us to be ill on holiday but when Little Bear is ill, I’m always reminded of his resilience, Marine-like toughness and general gorgeousness.

On this occasion, being poorly had also made him feel emotional and loose-lipped. He instigated an in depth adoption conversation about how scared he felt when he first met us (“because you’re both so tall”), how he really hadn’t wanted a brother (“I wanted to punch him in a private place”) and how angry he was with us for having ‘taken him’ from his foster carers. He has never managed to verbalise any of these things before and they certainly would go some way to explaining some of his behaviour. Although these are difficult things, I would far rather they were expressed than not.

I found myself wondering whether if we had not found ourselves trapped inside a wooden cabin in Finland by a vomiting bug, we would have had this (potentially progressive) conversation at all.

We talked for a long time. It felt like the kind of chat that would open things up and move things on.

All of us did a really good job of maintaining our humour for the first days of The Bug. Considering the circumstances, things really weren’t as bad as they sound because we were together and writing and reading kept me sane. I can’t lie though, by the end of the third day of being stuck inside the cabin, I was done. Beam me up. Take me home.

When we eventually got back, I felt I may have been released from prison which is obviously not the vibe you’d hope for after an amazing holiday. The getting back, with a partially well, partially unwell, highly dysregulated Little Bear in tow was not particularly easy. A big kick off several thousands of feet in the air, in a confined space is not any fun and is one way of calling into sharp focus the level of challenge we seem to be taking for granted.

The Bug was really unfortunate. Bad luck. But aside from that, was it worth it? Did the pros outweigh the cons? Were we brave or were we foolish for attempting such a holiday in the first place?

There were some clear pros: husky-sledding, meeting the reindeer, snow, sledging, snow, beautiful scenery, the Northern Lights, Big Bear discovering a love of cross country skiing and more snow. We couldn’t have got any of that here and the boys certainly gained from those experiences. I think there are even some perverse pros in having survived such an unwelcome scenario and coming home in mostly good humour: there is nothing like overcoming a challenge to make you realise what you can do.

I shall certainly not be booking another holiday abroad any time soon and long-haul is absolutely out of the question for some years yet (unless we wish to cause some sort of emergency diversion situation) but would I do it again? Yeah, probably. Not in the same place, obviously, but I would take Little Bear somewhere new again. I don’t know if that’s sheer bloody-mindedness, a refusal on our part to accept the full extent of Little Bear’s needs or a desire to plough on despite those needs. I don’t know. I think we might stick to self-catering for the foreseeable future though and maybe remember to anticipate some of the possible issues in advance.

But, you know, life is short and the world is wide. And some of us are more foolhardy than others.

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A Magical Adventure?

Back in the early summer, shortly after we lost Supergran, we were in the mood to seize life and make sure we lived it. We also knew that Gary was going to need something to look forward to, to help her find a way through her grief. So, without thinking it through too much, we booked a holiday to Lapland for the end of the year.

Grizzly has always wanted to go and was very excited. I, on the other hand, have been gifted with a brain that immediately leaps to the darkest places. Neither Bear has flown before (or been abroad) so consequently I have not left the country for 9 years. What if I had developed a fear of flying? What if the boys were terrible flyers? What if the plane crashed? What if there were terrorists in the airport? What if one of us got frostbite?

Sadly I’m not joking: this is just a small selection of my actual thoughts.

Thankfully by the time December came I had pretty much got over my irrational preoccupations and was finally getting excited. So excited in fact that we had to bring forward the date for telling the boys before I imploded. We had purposefully left it to the last minute so as not to overexcite them months in advance. I have no idea how we got away with it as we did loads of prep right under their noses!

In the end, we told them with 10 days to go. The news came in the form of a personalised letter/ invitation sent by Santa himself (!). Little Bear was immediately excited whereas Big Bear was immediately nervous about flying (I suspect he has inherited the going to dark places thing, bless him).

I had planned to use our light box as a visual countdown but it turned out that Little Bear didn’t need me to. For the first time he has been able to keep track of the countdown himself – each day knowing how many more sleeps were left, as well as managing to keep track of which door to open on his advent calendar. I was really impressed with how he managed it: his grasp of time and numbers has progressed a lot recently.

There didn’t appear to be any extra anxiety and whenever I tried to reassure or explain about flying, Little Bear just claimed he had flown before (which I know he hadn’t) and that he had been to Lapland before (hadn’t) and therefore knew all about it already. It was kind of difficult to argue with.

At the halfway point of the countdown I saw some PAS colleagues. As I was telling them what we were up to (the week before Christmas, with a potentially dysregulated child) they did look at me like I might be off my rocker. Was I?! Could this be an ill-thought through hellish disaster?

With 4 days to go, Little Bear woke up with a vomiting bug and proceeded to puke every half an hour for most of the day.

With 3 days to go, Little Bear was thankfully feeling a little better but we had a power cut so he couldn’t watch TV and I couldn’t have life-saving cups of tea. It felt like the week was turning into a black satire of the twelve days of Christmas. On the third day of Christmas my true love brought to me cabin fever hell, lots of vomit bowls and travel doubts a-plentyyyy…

Somehow, it all came together, as these things do, and we were getting up at 4:30am to go to the airport. I have to say I am extremely proud of how both Bears coped with the early start, airport mayhem and the travelling itself. We had a slightly dubious start as Little Bear marched confidently onto the plane and seated himself at an emergency exit. It was the stuff of nightmares! I could only imagine what he could get up to if we took our eyes off him for three seconds in that position.

Of course children cannot sit at emergency exits and instead Gary and I had to endure the talk about what to do if they shouted evacuate, evacuate, evacuate, which did at least clear up the issue of whether I had developed a fear of flying or not.

Entirely to his credit, it turns out that Little Bear is a brilliant flyer and not one bit of bother if allowed his IPad. Big Bear felt unwell to start with which was a shame but he got used to it too and had no difficulty on the way back.

Arriving over a snowy forest and landing on a runway hemmed by snow was pretty amazing. We had taken off at sunrise in the UK and landed three hours later at sunset in Finland. As Lapland is so far north (inside the Arctic circle in fact) they only have three hours of daylight at this point in the year. It was very confusing arriving at the hotel in the pitch black, a bit after 3pm, having just had breakfast on the plane. The dark was pretty difficult to get used to the whole time we were there really.

The hotel was lovely – warm, Christmassy and traditionally Finnish. No frills but cosy and with everything we needed. Previously we have only ever gone on self-catering holidays and being tied to the hotel timings was a bit tricky. Although we don’t stick rigidly to a timetable at home, we do stick to meal and bedtimes wherever we are or whatever we are doing. It is with good reason as those things remain a predictable constant and help Little Bear to stay regulated. In the hotel, the evening meal wasn’t available until 6pm, which is the time Little Bear usually gets ready for bed. With a bit of tactical snacking and turning a blind eye to Little Bear eating chips for every meal, we managed this ok.

The next morning however, I did nearly lose my calm due to a booking cock-up which meant that an excursion we had pre-booked from the UK for that afternoon was no longer available to us and the only time we could now do it was from 6:30 to 10pm at night. The Rep didn’t seem to be able to get his head around why that would be such a big deal to us. I think people think you should ‘just go with it’ but that is actually much harder than it sounds when you have a child with additional needs and you work so hard to keep things manageable for them. After a bit of a wobble (me) we decided to go with it to the best of our ability and changed our afternoon plan to ‘nap’ and hoped for the best. I am nothing if not resilient.

In retrospect (as much as it irks me to admit it), I have to say that I am grateful for the booking cock-up. Without it we would not have had the opportunity to whizz around a completely dark, peaceful, snow-drenched forest in a sled pulled by huskies, lit only by our head-torches, the stars and the green glow of the Northern Lights! It is hard to describe how awesome, calm and breath-taking it was. At minus 23 degrees it was also a little chilly. It was truly a once in a lifetime experience for all of us that I wouldn’t have wanted us to miss.

It was very special for Little Bear as he LOVES animals. He had been particularly excited about seeing the huskies before we went but we had warned him that they may not be friendly and we probably wouldn’t be able to stroke them. Before we got into the sleds for our safari, we went into a Kota (Lappish polygonal wooden hut) to have some hot berry juice and gingerbread and to warm up. The door opened to allow a guide to enter and in trotted a husky. The look on Little Bear’s face when he realised he could pet her was priceless. It turns out the huskies are highly trained, fully domesticated and love human attention. Little Bear and Nia became firm friends and it really made the trip for him (so much so that I need to print some photos for his room as he is missing her).

We were also able to pet the huskies who took us on our adventure. I discovered that a warm lick is a great way to warm cold hands afterwards!

It was a truly fantastic experience and the highlight of the trip for all of us.

Little Bear coped admirably with his very late night. He did ask to go to bed a few times and finally crashed out on the way back to the hotel in the coach.

Unfortunately on day 3 we couldn’t let the boys sleep in because we had to be on the coach at 8am for the next excursion. It was the trip to see Santa and I was concerned that we might have been dragged out of bed for a huge dose of crowds and commercialism. Once more, Lapland proved me wrong and massively surpassed my expectations: a feat which is difficult to accomplish as I am notoriously hard to impress.

Lapland doesn’t seem to do commercialism, just take-us-as-you-find-us natural beauty. We met Santa in a log cabin nestled beside a frozen lake, skirted with frost-encrusted trees. It felt authentic and pure. Somehow it didn’t feel overrun with us tourists, probably because it was a large-ish space and there were plenty of other things to do. The boys played snow football on the frozen lake, we sledged down a hill again and again and when our fingers and toes got nippy we went inside to ice gingerbread. No gift shops, no gimmicks, no glitz.

The Fins also seem to have a fairly lax attitude towards health and safety which meant that Grizzly and I both got to drive a snowmobile (and the husky sleds) after a three second tutorial (the Bears and Gary were in the sleds, on the back of a snowmobile or in a sleigh pulled by a guide). I’m not exactly known for my daring but I bloody loved it and could have scooted round on the snowmobile for ages if they’d have let me.

By the afternoon, Little Bear was wilting in front of our eyes. His ability to listen and co-operate was diminishing by the minute. The itinerary for the evening was a Festive Finale beginning at 7pm. Grizzly and I could tell that this was not a risk worth taking. The signs were there that we would not be able to ‘just go with it’ this time and in all likelihood it would be an unmitigated disaster. Not seeing the point of setting him up to fail, we decided that I would stay at the hotel with him and put him to bed and Grizzly and Gary would take Big Bear to the party.

The Rep tried to tell me how much we would be missing out on and though he was trying to be nice, I just wanted him to p*** off as he had no clue about Little Bear, his needs or what would go down if we did attend (it wouldn’t be pretty). Sometimes you have to trust your judgement and know when not to be swayed.

Big Bear had a fantastic time running wild with his new friends and evidently screaming, judging by his husky voice today.

Other than the tweaks/ blips I’ve mentioned and a bit of a tricky passage through Kittila airport with an over-hungry and over-tired and overwhelmed Little Bear (the airport is tiny but packed to the rafters with people), the overall trip was a big success. Even when we weren’t going on trips or doing activities, the Bears just loved being in the snow. They have never seen snow that deep or fluffy before and stepping into it right up to their thighs never grew tiring for them.

The trip was over in a flash and no one was quite ready to go home.

There were minor challenges (there were always going to be) but thankfully no major ones. I would say that our few days were no more difficult than they would have been were Little Bear enduring the final days of term in school. If anything, they were a bit easier, and we had a whole lot more fun and an unforgettable experience. I certainly wouldn’t be averse to taking the children out of school again (at this point in the term) and we now know that travelling abroad is a risk worth taking.

Lapland, we have loved you, you were truly spectacular and you may well have given us the travelling bug as well as some unforgettable memories.

Thank you from all the Bears xx