Freddy's blog: Plans

I don’t like to make plans. My wife and I spent a lot of time talking about it in our early years. When we were single, she used to divide Friday night to Sunday night into seven time slots to make plans for. I assumed I’d go to the pub on Friday night and keep my options open for the rest of the weekend, hoping to take up none of them. That is one of the things that made us a little ‘opposites attract’. It also made me despair a number of times as I realised my next free weekend was six months away. Good prep for parenthood though, and I’m ok with it now. Well, better than I was.

Further down the line, in many far more important and mature respects we’re completely on the same page: at a kitchen showroom recently we surprised the designer who returned from his temporary retreat during, he said, the ordinarily marriage-breaking act of choosing handles and taps to find it had taken us 30 seconds to agree. (Seriously, though. Handles and taps.) Despite that simplicity, the new kitchen requires complex plans. My wife has taken up arms; I am really trying to be a useful assistant.

Reflecting on that, some weddings coming up (suits, frocks, train tickets, someone to look after the puppy we’re getting), a new baby arriving in November, a tricky childcare period beforehand (my 4th flexible working arrangement to come),  fellow bloggers’ descriptions of their lives (which always seem more complicated than our own) and a company restructure that has left me unsure what plans others might have for me, life can seem a battle of making plans, making plans align, challenging plans, replanning thwarted plans. And I’ve always felt a perfect plan is impossible: you just have to dive in to get something moving and then fit the rest around that.

But I do enjoy planning holidays. I take research on Airbnb very seriously and I’m good at it. Last week we had a 17th century fountain in Tuscany for a swimming pool. See?

Despite this there are inevitable moments of stress, particularly on the journey, and particularly when ‘daddy donkey’ as our 3 year old called me, was wheeling two suitcases around while carrying a massive yellow backpack containing a car seat. As we trudged to the Pisa airport car rental place in a long line of sweaty British ants, I remembered something I’d read recently about seeing things through your toddler’s eyes.

So the trudge is actually an adventure walk along a red path, past small planes with propellers. We’d rented a VW Polo ‘or equivalent’ and naturally got a poor equivalent. But once I’d completed the always surprisingly difficult and violent task of getting the car seat into the isofix points, our daughter had a better view than she normally has. And for the next week she made pretty much all the plans, taking control of how much time we spent in the pool. Our day of predicted bad weather turned into a hot day on the beach (mum’s plan – credit where it’s due) where she ran the show.

Back home means back to the complex plans, but I want to keep it up. It’s a simple thing, but sometimes the plan becomes reality and reality itself is lost. (There is a good (very) short story on this called ‘On Exactitude in Science’ by Borges.) Reality is what our daughter sees: a tap is a tap, we can only do what we’re doing right now, and that thing should be swimming.

Freddy works in communications at trade association in the City, except on Friday afternoons when he takes his three-year old daughter swimming.

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• Families