If you imagine going on holiday with a baby is horrendously difficult, you’d be absolutely right. You’d also be quite spectacularly wrong. So work that one out.

By way of introduction, we went glamping on the Isle of Wight from Monday to Friday. Of course, you can call it glamping all you want, but a ‘canvas cottage’ is still a tent in a field buffeted by September winds and rattled by the first rains of autumn. Once your clothes are wet, they stay wet, the bed is made of foam on the floor, and at night the temperature drops to around twelve degrees.

As I have mentioned in a previous post (Out and About With Baby), the anxiety that goes hand-in-hand with Asperger’s Syndrome means just going to the shops by myself is a major ordeal. However, this doesn’t preclude the possibility of going away – since going out’s already so stressful, the anxiety from a holiday is a difference of kind rather than intensity, and if you’re going to struggle anyway, it makes a pleasant change doing it somewhere other than home.

For a similar reason, since looking after a baby is already so difficult, holidaying with one isn’t that much harder. At home your life revolves around sterilising bottles, making up feeds, changing nappies, and ensuring the little one is wearing clean clothes, is the right temperature, and you have enough spares of everything to stock your own branch of Mothercare. On holiday, the same applies. The main difference is that instead of popping to the supermarket, attending mother-and-baby groups, walking the dog or heading into town for a coffee, on holiday you’re visiting a stately home, taking part in an axe-throwing competition, playing crazy golf or searching for somewhere that does gluten-free cream teas (not common, I can tell you!).

Of course, there are other difficulties specific to travelling with a three-month-old. You leave home with the car piled up to the roof because you don’t know what the weather’s going to be like or how the baby will develop – one day she’s happy with the carry cot/pram, but the next she spends the whole day doing stomach crunches as she tries to sit up and you need to use the pushchair instead, or else she’ll have abs to die for. In addition to the travel system base unit, carry cot, pushchair and car seat, sunhoods and raincovers, parasol and umbrella, you have to add the steriliser, bottle warmer, changing bag, extras with which to refill the changing bag, baby’s suitcase containing warm weather and cold weather outfits, your partner’s suitcase, your backpack, a couple of rucksacks of food, drink, formula, a paperback (like you’ll ever find time to read it!), 6-way adapter plug, phone charger, Glo-egg. I have no idea how people can go away with two kids because we maxed out the available space with one.

Then there’s the fact you’re out and about for most of the day. When we go away, Lizzie and I tend to burn the candle at both ends, so to speak – Monday to Friday, and we checked out Alum Bay, Freshwater Bay and Ventnor, played crazy golf at Shanklin, enjoyed the arcades at Sandown, explored the WWII ruins at Culver Down, saw the windmill at Bembridge, walked the beaches at Whitecliff Bay and Ryde, visited Osborne House, East Cowes and Cowes, scoffed tasters at the Garlic Farm, shopped at Arreton Barns and Newport, navigated a hedge maze in Godshill, and still found time to go swimming twice with the baby, win a pub quiz and have a meal out. Such a heavy schedule means you need your sleep at night, and if the baby sleeps through as she started doing a few days before she went, then all is good.

Except the baby doesn’t sleep through. Because the routine has been altered, she alters with it. She knows things are different so she behaves differently. She doesn’t get tired when she usually does, doesn’t want to miss things, becomes overstimulated by all the sights and sounds and smells – ‘look, daddy, Queen Victoria’s bed, and a gold chandelier, and what sort of wax are they using to clean these marvellous wooden floors?’ So she keeps going, gets over-tired and grumpy, crashes suddenly early evening, and wakes at two am and five am. So holidaying with a baby means you’re horribly tired, and when you get home you really need another holiday.

Then there are the smaller practical considerations. Playing crazy golf, for example, is exceedingly awkward when you keep having to move the pushchair down staircases, over speed bumps and around lighthouses and windmills. You can’t play air hockey in an arcade with just the two of you, and nobody to watch the baby. Every time you get out of the car you have to debate whether to use the carry cot, pushchair, car seat or sling. And all the while, the clock is ticking between feeds, so you keep part of your brain focused on where you’ll be and whether there will be a cafe there where you can warm the bottle.

I think one of the hardest things about holidaying with a baby is that when she’s having an unsettled day, you’re stuck with her. At home you’d put her in her Moses Basket, rock her to sleep, perhaps go for a walk, put on some music or the television, and when all else fails you can take turns with your partner, allowing one of you a few moments of respite. On the last day we left the campsite at half ten and the ferry wasn’t until after seven. Izzie spent the whole day grizzling, crying, having mini-tantrums and demanding constant stimulation. This culminated in an utter refusal to sit in her car seat, and endless screaming when she did. Every time I tried to put her in the car seat she would straighten out and go stiff as a board, so I’d have to try and get her to bend at the waist, force her bottom into the seat, and hold her there with one hand while I attempted to put her straps on with the other. She might only be three months old but she knows what she wants and what she doesn’t, and boy is she strong!

But it’s not all bad. Going away with a baby didn’t stop us from doing most of the things we’d normally have done without her, and her smiles and chuckles made up for just about all the tears and screaming and inconveniences. Her fascination with every trivial, insignificant detail is a wonder to see and makes you look at things with new eyes. And you get to feel like a proper grown-up.

All in all, going on holiday with a baby is hard work, but so is everything when you have a baby. It’s a slightly different experience from holidaying as a couple – you’re more focused on the baby and her welfare than on the things you’re actually doing – but by taking you away from the everyday grind, you can enjoy one another’s company and bond as a family without the usual stresses of home. That said, I’m in no hurry to repeat the experience unless it comes with a guarantee of four nights of uninterrupted sleep!