How to celebrate Mother’s Day when you both live in different places

Mums are great, aren’t they? You never realise just exactly how much until you have a baby yourself. Unfortunately I’ve not actually lived in the same place as mine since I was 18 and went off around the world on my travels. I never really went back; there was university, another gap year, and then the big move down to London. My mum now lives in Bournemouth, and my mother-in-law in Sheffield, and even though they’re only short distances really, it can seem like it’s really far.

We try and make an effort to go and see both on Mother’s Day, of course, but it’s not always possible. Like last year when we’d only just had the baby and getting on a train was the last thing on our minds (a train? And a three week old baby? Yikes).

It’s a given that you’ll send a card – right? – but it’s always nice to do something else. Here are a few of my tried and tested ways for keeping in touch and celebrating Mothering Sunday when you can’t physically be together:

• A phone call, of course! Simple but really effective. Even if it’s just telling each other stories you’ve told each other millions of times before (tell me that’s not just me and my mum?)
• But one better is…video calling. When Apple first bought out FaceTime, I remember thinking ‘who on earth would use that?’ And since having the baby I now know; people with babies who live apart from grandparents. We use FaceTime and Skype all the time to speak to both sets, and most of the time we just point the camera at whatever Eliza’s doing. It’s such a lovely way of keeping in touch, and makes the distance seem so much shorter
• Make and email a video. You can even use Vine now which is about as simple as you can get (I love Vine! I’m Gillian Crawshaw if you want to follow me). We made a video recently of Eliza walking, and everyone loved it
• Have something delivered. Flowers are the obvious one and you can’t really go wrong. My brothers and I have had food delivered before for a nice meal so they don’t have to cook, and one year we sent ingredients for a cream tea for two (along with fizzy wine and the newspaper) – just from a normal supermarket
• Sending something in the post: one simple thing my mum always loves is when we send a parcel of photos down, and she also really loves ‘art’ that the baby has made
• Or the biggest surprise at all, pay her a visit. Don’t let her know you’re coming, just turn up. It’ll make it one to remember.

Have a lovely Mothers Day whatever you get up to x.