– 11:08 am

Your mother took you to Frankfurt for four days last Friday… by herself. Just the two of you, travelling solo. I can just about manage dropping you off at your grandparents’, a three-minute walk away. So the thought of packing half the house, taking you through airport security, onto a plane, anticipating your every need or mood and catering for it in advance is exhausting just writing it down. I could use a brown paper bag just now.

But maybe the mindset is different for a mother. The planner that I am, I’m pretty sure if I had to do this and had every item on my list checked off, I’d be settled. I imagine that’s how Liza approached this as well. Besides, if history is anything to go by, you were effortless when we flew for the first time.

Nevertheless, I was still slightly anxious (for Liza) when I waved you goodbye at the gates. There’s just no knowing what to expect. I wasn’t worried, however, more like, “Fuck me, she’s brave!”

But all went well. You were, again, the perfect travel companion, adult-like. Your mother reports having a terrific time with you throughout her stay. Your expression in the pictures aligns with that sentiment, laughing (and drooling) in your wife-beater vest (as it was thirty degrees plus) the entire time. You didn’t look like you wanted to come back.

This trip (to visit her childhood friend Olya who has a four-year-old daughter Renata) had been on the books for a hot minute. The ticket had to be amended the last time because Olya was unwell. As I understand it, Liza and Olya have been inseparable since their teens. So it was always just a matter of when.

Thank God for the trip though. You slept through the night from the day you landed in Germany. We immediately assumed jet lag and tiredness from the journey. But then you did the same thing the following night, sleeping from ten to six. And again the night after. So we got curious. Without consulting each other, Valerie and I asked Liza to highlight any visible differences between your surroundings in Germany versus the ones here. She reported “white noise” – racist – and “my time with him is a lot calmer”.

I’ve dispelled the white noise theory since you got back home. You’re still sleeping through the night in the same conditions. Last night and the one before, you went to bed around ten, and it was about five am when your mother brought you down to me. I fed you to sleep, and you didn’t wake up til after nine.

The only changes we’ve made so far are putting you to bed two hours later and altering your diet. Your mother did some research (which her friend Maria from the NCT group confirmed) suggesting Hipp 2 might be giving you constipation. So we’ve since gone back a step, and yesterday, your grandparents had you on a vegetarian diet to test whether meat was a factor in your sleeping patterns. If you don’t sleep enough when we re-introduce it, then perhaps that theory has some legs.

For now, my take on this is pretty simple. We just have to put you to bed a couple of hours later. The extra hours running around is compounding. It takes its toll, beating you down into exhaustion. The only way to recover is to sleep.