What is it like if the grandparents live far away?

Exactly, dear Evelin, shortly before I wrote this text, my two girls (8 and 5 years old) were with my parents-in-law in northern Germany during the autumn holidays - alone for the first time and for a whole week. It was a strange feeling, even though I always knew that they were having a wonderful time there.

Dear Andrea, your parents-in-law live in Celle in northern Germany and your two daughters rarely see their grandparents. How do you keep in touch with your family at such a great distance?

Evelin Hartmann

While I grew up with a very «classic» grandparent model (two sets of grandparents in two households, one within a 5-minute drive and the other within a 20-minute drive), my girls experience things a little differently today. Their grandparents live in three different households and their paternal grandparents live in northern Germany, exactly 790 kilometres away.

As it is very important to me that the girls can build up a good relationship with their grandparents, we have tried to maintain contact not only through visits but also in other ways since the children were small. Unfortunately, my father-in-law is also a little older, which means that my parents-in-law can no longer travel to us in Switzerland as often.

Nevertheless, we naturally try to maintain contact as much as possible so that both our girls and my parents-in-law always see each other as important people in their lives.

We try to ensure that my parents-in-law can be as involved as possible in the everyday lives of their two granddaughters and always know when an important event in their lives is coming up - and not just the «big» events such as birthdays, Christmas or the first day of school, of course, but also smaller everyday events such as the first gap in their teeth, a troublesome flu or a good place in a ski race.

Of course, the telephone plays an important role here, but letters are also becoming increasingly important (and that in the age of e-mail ...). My mother-in-law is a passionate letter writer and since my older daughter has been able to write, a really nice pen friendship has developed between the two of them. And of course, we proud parents also occasionally send up-to-date photos of the girls to the grandparents in the far north.

During the autumn holidays, both girls spent a week on their own with their grandparents in northern Germany for the first time. They had a wonderful time and really enjoyed spending a week with their grandparents, who they don't usually see that often, and at the same time getting to know the neighbourhood where my husband grew up. Another highlight of the week was that they were able to spend a lot of time with their cousin, who is almost the same age and lives near their grandparents.

My daughters not only had a nice, quiet and relaxed week's holiday, but also got to know their roots a little better, and my parents-in-law also really enjoyed spending a lot of time with their granddaughters, who live further away, and not just enjoying them at a weekend or at a family celebration.

The infamous grandma envy as a new mum

When I think back to my time as a new mum, I remember that at the beginning I struggled a little with the fact that I had a little less help at my side due to the fact that my parents-in-law live further away. In addition, I was sometimes accompanied by an underlying «fear» at the beginning that my girls might miss out on something because they rarely see their paternal grandparents.

However, time has taught me that although each grandparent has a different physical presence in my daughters' lives, this does not mean that they favour one or the other or that someone is less important to them. On the contrary, today I even think it's nice that the children have close contact with all their grandparents and that they all play an important, albeit different, role in their lives.

Both girls are already talking about how they would like to spend a week's holiday in northern Germany again next year. Even though we are not yet ready with our planning and nothing has been finalised yet, I would be very happy if the opportunity for a time of intensive exchange with their grandparents could be found again next year.