Thank you for all the interesting comments! I'm sorry it took me a while to respond to all of them, but Gmail helpfully started tagging all my comment notifications as spam shortly after the post.
The most clear conclusion, though only 3 of you were brave enough to tick it outright, was "Rachel, Tony & Charles are strange". That is, we are different from the majority of UK parents in the following ways:
1. We don't own a car, so we have no default travel option.
2. Although we do use hired or borrowed cars when that seems the best option, only one of us can drive (and it's the mother rather than the father).
3. We are comfortable using public transport, and have years of experience travelling together thereon to calibrate how much we can reasonably manage.
4. Most of our UK journeys are long-distance (and thus requiring more effort from the sole driver), between cities/towns well linked by trains, and with reasonable buggy-friendly urban bus provision. Our experience is that train+bus doesn't add much more time to each journey than the many necessary comfort stops when driving with the baby.
5. We live in a particularly compact, walking- and cycling-friendly city which shapes our expectations of how to get around.
6. All of the above constrain our purchases of luggage, baby equipment, in fact anything we might want to take on holiday, to the lightweight and portable.
7. We breastfeed and co-sleep, both of which cut down our required baby baggage considerably.
Because driving isn't the norm for us, when we do drive, we are probably more stressed than on trains/buses. Certainly I am more tired. These will both communicate themselves to Charles and affect his mood. I am also ignoring Charles for long periods in order to drive, and he's still clingier to me than to Tony. It's likely also that he's not terribly used to the car or the car seat, and the car seat is more restrictive than the buggy. He is also at a particularly wriggly phase and doesn't seem to sit still anywhere for more than five minutes unless restrained or asleep. I suspect the biggest improvement we could make to long-distance car journeys would be to have a second driver, both to give me a break and to give Charles more mummy-time. Perhaps when I'm feeling less traumatised about the last few long car trips, we can experiment if an appropriate journey comes up.
In any case, I am now much less puzzled about having to repeatedly defend not-driving-with-Charles, which was mostly the point of the exercise. Thanks for helping me examine my assumptions.
The most clear conclusion, though only 3 of you were brave enough to tick it outright, was "Rachel, Tony & Charles are strange". That is, we are different from the majority of UK parents in the following ways:
1. We don't own a car, so we have no default travel option.
2. Although we do use hired or borrowed cars when that seems the best option, only one of us can drive (and it's the mother rather than the father).
3. We are comfortable using public transport, and have years of experience travelling together thereon to calibrate how much we can reasonably manage.
4. Most of our UK journeys are long-distance (and thus requiring more effort from the sole driver), between cities/towns well linked by trains, and with reasonable buggy-friendly urban bus provision. Our experience is that train+bus doesn't add much more time to each journey than the many necessary comfort stops when driving with the baby.
5. We live in a particularly compact, walking- and cycling-friendly city which shapes our expectations of how to get around.
6. All of the above constrain our purchases of luggage, baby equipment, in fact anything we might want to take on holiday, to the lightweight and portable.
7. We breastfeed and co-sleep, both of which cut down our required baby baggage considerably.
Because driving isn't the norm for us, when we do drive, we are probably more stressed than on trains/buses. Certainly I am more tired. These will both communicate themselves to Charles and affect his mood. I am also ignoring Charles for long periods in order to drive, and he's still clingier to me than to Tony. It's likely also that he's not terribly used to the car or the car seat, and the car seat is more restrictive than the buggy. He is also at a particularly wriggly phase and doesn't seem to sit still anywhere for more than five minutes unless restrained or asleep. I suspect the biggest improvement we could make to long-distance car journeys would be to have a second driver, both to give me a break and to give Charles more mummy-time. Perhaps when I'm feeling less traumatised about the last few long car trips, we can experiment if an appropriate journey comes up.
In any case, I am now much less puzzled about having to repeatedly defend not-driving-with-Charles, which was mostly the point of the exercise. Thanks for helping me examine my assumptions.
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