My Four-Year-Old Asked to Sleep Over Without Us, in a Country She Visits Once a Year

 My four-year-old asked to sleep over at her cousins' house. Without us. In a country she visits once a year and otherwise only knows through video calls.

I asked her twice. Really? You'll be okay? No mum and dad? She said yes both times, completely unbothered, already halfway down the hallway after her cousins. Her sister, three at the time, started crying because she wanted to stay too, and that one we had to talk out of it and bring home.

We drove to my in-laws' place that night with one daughter instead of two, and I spent most of the ride quietly stunned. She adores those boys, her cousins, both in early primary school. But this is a child who used to bury her face in my shoulder for the first three days of every Korea trip.

We Always Go Around Chuseok

Once a year, roughly, and almost always timed to Chuseok.

The reasoning is practical rather than sentimental. Singapore has one season, so going to Korea in deep winter means buying an entire wardrobe for two weeks. Korean summer is humid and heavy in a way that isn't much of a break from what we already live in. Late summer into autumn is the sweet spot, mild enough that the girls need almost nothing extra, and the holiday itself means relatives are gathered anyway.

We usually stay about two weeks.

My leave situation makes that possible. On my expat contract I get thirty days annual leave with no separate medical leave, so illness comes out of the same pot. Local colleagues typically have something like fifteen days annual and fifteen medical, and there's a well-understood routine where someone who isn't especially unwell visits a GP, gets one or two days of MC, and the company just says fine. Nobody interrogates it.

I mostly hoard mine. Around ten days goes to Korea and the rest sits in reserve for the girls being sick or school closing unexpectedly. Using leave on myself feels almost wasteful at this point.

Two Weeks of Appointments

Every trip turns into a scheduling exercise. A year's worth of postponed admin gets crammed into fourteen days.

Vaccinations for both girls. Infant health checks where the timing works out. Government office errands that can only be done in person. Anything either of us has been vaguely worried about medically for the past twelve months. Last year I finally did a full health screening after five years of not bothering, and paid properly for it.

We're careful with the girls, at least. A proper consultation at the paediatrician first, then two or three vaccinations at a time rather than lining them all up in one sitting. But there's always a point around day eight where I look at the calendar and realise we've been running errands in a country we're technically visiting.

The Prices Genuinely Shock Me Now

Six years in Singapore has broken my sense of what things cost.

Half a Korean-style fried chicken here runs about thirty-nine dollars. In Korea a whole one from a franchise is around twenty-five thousand won. Jokbal, bossam, pizza, samgyeopsal, all of it lands the same way, and I catch myself doing the conversion and then just quietly ordering more.

Then there's delivery. I ordered something late at night on my first trip back after a long gap and it was outside the door the next morning. Singapore isn't slow exactly, two or three days for local stock, but a lot of what we buy ships from China, Malaysia, Vietnam or Indonesia and takes anywhere from five days to over three weeks. It's cheaper for the distance, and I've made peace with it, though I'll admit I trust Korean product testing and safety certification more than I trust some of what arrives here.

Medical is the big one. Basic childhood vaccinations are free in Korea. Here each one runs seventy to a hundred dollars, often more. A GP consultation starts around a hundred, so an ordinary cold with medication lands near two hundred without anything unusual happening. If you're mobile enough to fly, getting treated in Korea can genuinely work out cheaper than staying put, and the standard of care and follow-up is, in my experience, still ahead.

Kids cafes were the other surprise. I had no idea about any of this before having children. Similar price to Singapore, completely different scale and quality.

We fly back with three or four immigration bags and every suitcase full.

They Remember Better Than We Do

The girls treat Korea as a holiday. That's the frame, we're going on holiday, and it's accurate for them.

In 2023 and 2024 they were properly shy. Grandparents they see once a year, relatives they'd never met, and both of them stayed glued to us for days. Now they walk in and start playing. Still cling in genuinely unfamiliar situations, but the family part has clicked.

What actually startles me is their memory. Weeks after we're back in Singapore, one of us will start telling a story and forget a name, and one of the girls will supply it instantly. That's so-and-so. She'll have met the person twice in her life and she just has it.

Language helps. We speak Korean at home almost entirely, so both of them are comfortable in it. My eldest is now working through simple Korean picture books she brought back, and practising Hangul writing on her own in a notebook. She's also learning Chinese at an academy because she wanted to, which I still find slightly funny. Reading one page used to take her an hour and a half. She's genuinely fluent through them now.

The Goodbye Part

My wife has one older brother and both his children are boys, so our two granddaughters occupy a particular place with her parents.

My eldest spent her entire first year in Korea. We'd wanted to bring her to Singapore straight away, but Covid was severe enough that my wife stayed on. So her grandfather knew her as a newborn, day to day, for twelve months. That connection never went anywhere.

Then we spend two weeks there and leave.

We start warning the girls three or four days out. A few more sleeps and we go back to Singapore, and you'll be back at childcare. Repeated daily so it isn't a shock.

I found out afterwards that my mother-in-law cried once we'd gone. Nobody mentioned it at the airport.

Landing at Changi

I still don't get the "we're home" feeling walking through Changi. I've been waiting six years for it.

Part of that is being a foreigner here. There's a background hum of things that might happen, permits, approvals, decisions made by people you'll never speak to, and it doesn't switch off.

It's become the default setting though, rather than something I actively feel. And it's definitely calmer than landing in a country I don't know at all. Singapore is where our week happens, where the girls' school is, where our routines live. Whether that adds up to home, I honestly can't say yet.

What I do know is that a four-year-old asked to sleep at her cousins' house in Korea without us, and slept fine, and that's a version of belonging I wasn't expecting either of them to develop.

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