The Summer of Nutella Sandwiches Or: what I learned about parenting when everything went spectacularly wrong

It started with a beautiful plan.

Six weeks in a stunning chalet in the Swiss mountains. The kind of setting that makes you feel, just by being in it, that life is generous and good. Four children, the youngest barely nine months old, the oldest nine. My husband working abroad. Adventurous, yes. But I had done harder things, and the chalet was beautiful, and the mountains were there, and it was going to be a wonderful summer.

Then, just before we left, someone asked if I could take in a fourteen-year-old cousin who was going through a difficult time and needed stability. There was genuine need. I said yes.

Then, a few days later, someone else asked if I could also take in a four-year-old cousin with troubles of his own.

I said yes to that, too.

In hindsight, I have asked myself many times how anyone could have suggested either of these things to a woman about to spend six weeks alone in a mountain chalet with a nine-month-old. And I have asked myself, even more often, how I agreed. But there was need. And so I did it.

Six children. One puppy. No husband. A gorgeous chalet in the Swiss mountains, with help arriving once a week to clean – and not a moment more.

And then the puppy scratched my finger.

It sounds like nothing. It was not nothing. Within days, the infection had spread far enough that my entire right arm, from hand to shoulder, was immobilized in plaster for three weeks. Keep it still. Keep it elevated. Avoid any risk of further infection.

I had six children, one arm, a once-weekly cleaner, and the most beautiful view in Switzerland.

The fourteen-year-old, it must be said, was not what anyone would call additional help. She was going through a difficult phase, and she needed as much hand-holding as the smallest children. The four-year-old, same. Worse, actually. They were both charges, not resources. Which meant the washing, the bathing, the meals, the shopping – all of it fell to me, one-armed, in a chalet that was becoming increasingly difficult to resupply.

So we ate Nutella sandwiches.

For breakfast. For lunch. And on the evenings when even Nutella felt ambitious, we had Barilla with ready-made sauce from a jar. In a stunning Swiss mountain chalet. For a woman raised in a family where meals were a serious and considered affair, this was, to put it very mildly, an aberration.

And yet.

My children hold some of their warmest memories from that summer. The chalet. The mountains. The puppy. The chaos. The Nutella. The summer Mom’s arm was in plaster and everything was gloriously, spectacularly mad.

I laughed a great deal that summer. Not because it was easy – it was objectively insane, and anyone who had seen the laundry situation would have wept. But because at a certain point, when the situation has escalated sufficiently beyond your control, laughter is not just the best option. It is the only sane one.

And here is what that summer taught me, not as a parenting philosophy but as a lived, Nutella-scented reality:

Your children do not need you to have it together. They need you to stay.

They need you present, engaged, and willing to laugh at the absurdity of it all alongside them. They need to see that when life goes sideways – and it will, spectacularly, repeatedly, often at the worst possible moment – the response is not panic, not the strive for perfection, not a carefully curated backup plan.

The response is: alright. Nutella sandwiches it is. Pass me the bread.

Children raised by parents who can laugh at chaos learn something no framework can teach them. That life is unpredictable, that imperfection is survivable, and that the people who love them will not crumble when things get hard.

They will just open another jar of Nutella.

That is not lowering the bar. That is understanding what the bar is actually for.

You are not failing when your summer looks nothing like the one you planned. You are not failing when dinner comes from a jar, when the puppy causes a medical incident, when the best you can offer is your presence and a slightly unhinged sense of humor.

You are parenting. Imperfectly, humanly, really.

And years from now, if you are very lucky, your children will look back at the chaotic summers, the Nutella winters, the spectacularly derailed plans… and they will smile.

Not despite the imperfection. Because of it.