Start with the handover, not the destination
The single most useful thing you can do is write everything down. Not because your partner or your parents are incapable, but because primary caregivers carry an enormous amount of undocumented operational knowledge, and none of it is obvious from outside.
Which child needs the blue cup. What time the after-school club closes and what happens if you are five minutes late. The name of the friend they have fallen out with. Where the spare inhaler is. Which parent at the gate does the pickup on Thursdays. A single shared document with all of this in it converts a week of interruptions into a week of nobody needing to phone you.
Write the handover note as if for a competent stranger. Routines and timings, medical details and dosages, allergies, school and club contacts, emergency numbers, the GP, and written consent for medical treatment if the carer is not a parent.
The departure is the emotionally loaded bit
Long goodbyes make things harder, not easier, and this is one of the few pieces of advice that almost every parent independently arrives at. A calm, short, confident departure gives children far more reassurance than an extended one. Telling them plainly when you will be back, in units they understand, works better than reassurance about how much you will miss them.
There is a practical argument for a door-to-door pickup here that has nothing to do with luxury. A car that arrives at the house means the goodbye happens once, at home, on your terms, rather than being stretched across a station platform or repeated in a drop-off zone where you cannot stop for more than two minutes. If the family is not coming to the airport, the departure is contained.
Build a schedule that survives your absence
Work backwards from the immovable objects. School runs, clubs, medical appointments, work shifts for whoever is covering. Anything that cannot move defines the shape of the week. Then be ruthless about cancelling the things that can move; a week with fewer commitments is easier for the person covering, and nobody needs swimming lessons to happen on schedule.
Book your return with a buffer. Landing at 11pm the night before a school day is a specific kind of misery and it is entirely self-inflicted. If you can land a day before you resume normal duties, do.
Choose flights around handovers, not around price
The cheapest flight is often the 6am one, which means leaving the house at 3:30am, which means either waking the household or arranging an overnight handover the evening before. The saving is rarely worth it. A mid-morning departure lets you do the school run yourself and leave afterwards, which removes an entire logistical layer and is much easier on everyone.
The same logic applies in reverse. A return that lands mid-afternoon lets you be at the school gate. That single detail does more for the re-entry than anything else.
Staying in contact without undermining the week
One scheduled call a day at a predictable time works better than sporadic contact. Children settle into an absence when it has a rhythm; they unsettle when the phone might ring at any moment. It also protects the carer, who otherwise spends the week managing a running commentary.
Agree in advance what counts as worth calling you about. Most parents set this bar far too low and then spend the trip adjudicating disputes about screen time from another country.
The first trip should be small
Two nights, somewhere you can get home from in a few hours, is a much better first attempt than a week abroad. It proves the system works, it gives everyone a manageable rehearsal, and it makes the next one straightforward. Parents who try to make their first solo trip in eight years a fortnight in another hemisphere tend to spend the whole time anxious.
Coming back
Expect the re-entry to be strange. Children frequently save up their reaction and deliver it as clinginess or as a spike of bad behaviour two days after you return, which is normal and is not a verdict on your decision. The carer will also want acknowledgement of what they did, and the fastest way to sour the arrangement is to walk in and start correcting how the week was run.