Hellobee Boards

I haven't been away for longer than a day, but we Facetime often! Next week, I'm going away for 3 days as well for work and it's killing me. I can't even take time off beforehand since I've been so busy, so there will be lots of Facetiming. He does really well with it...gets excited to see me, but realizes that I'm not there.

I've done it several times. Granted C has a daddy preference so other than telling DH that he misses me it hasn't been a big deal. When DH is gone though I usually have to make promises at each nap or nighttime that I will call DH and let him know that C wants him. As long as C knows that I will tell DH, C will settle down but it took me awhile to figure out that he needed that comfort of knowing Daddy knows he wants him. Usually if I'm gone we'll facetime a bit and it makes C happy to see me. If DH is gone and we facetime C tends to get frustrated if it is close to bed time when the daddy preference really rears its ugly head so we avoid those times.

@Freckles: I went away for 5 days and decided not to do any video chat or FaceTime. My parents stayed with her and she was fine the whole time. I didn't want to risk upsetting her.

We started telling her about 10 days before we left that Mama was going to go on a trip with Dada. She understands that Dada goes on trips for work. She would get all sad and anxious when we told her and almost started crying a few times and would say "mama stay home" or "Clara go on trip" and we'd tell her that she would be staying with her grandma. I didn't want to tell her so early but my husband thought it would be better. We'd talk about it a few times a day and each time she was less upset and tell us "mama go on trip. Dada go on trip" "Clara stay with grandma". I was so sad to leave for our flight at 5am bc I wouldn't get to say goodbye but she was fine and had fun the whole time. My mom took her to all usual activities and she never cried for us. She would tell my mom that we went on a trip. Looking back I'm really glad we told her about it beforehand

My LO was 26 months at the time. I think it helped that we had gone away for 3 days when she was 20 months.