Apologies for the value leeching, but I'm looking for some advice that's maybe too specific to be covered (as far as I can tell) by the reading material or the general askMRP archives. I've been lurking for a while, but made the decision to engage fully this week. Here's my introductory OYS.

My wife and I are taking a 2.5 week vacation to visit her family over the holiday period, taking our 2yr old son with us. During this time we will be staying in her home town, in a spare room in her grandparents' place. We've done this a few times over the past few years, and while her family are your typical basket of brawling cats, they're generally good people and do an impressive job of getting along when we're around. So far so good.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to preserve frame during this trip. The format has a tendency to turn me into something of a passenger... our schedule ends up pretty packed during these visits, with lots of people keen to catch up with us for mornings, afternoons etc. We live on the other side of the world, so there's a scarcity factor at play. My wife naturally ends up in charge of our schedule, and it's hard to argue with that: this is her extended family, and I know they will have been chatting about it for weeks now. It would be obviously ridiculous for me to try and muscle in at this point.

Brief pause.

I can clearly make out the shape of the Winter 2019 version of this trip, where I'm a calm captain gracefully delegating the minutia of our itinerary to my capable and loving first mate/secretary while I focus on charming old friends and relatives, have snowball fights with the kids and get her grandfather drunk on scotch. But I'm not there yet. I haven't put in the work.

One thing that has become very clear to me since unplugging is that I need to do whatever it takes to avoid being a second kid for my wife to take care of. There are plenty of signs of this malaise all around us, from seemingly innocent things (adjusting my clothing, dusting lint off my shoulders) to the wildly irritating nagging about chores. Definitely doesn't make me attractive mate material. I'm confident of making decent progress over the next month, but I could really use a strategy to minimise the unhelpful backsliding this trip could cause.

With all of that typed out, I can see at least two possibilities. First: "suck it up." After all, it's just a couple of weeks, and if it sets me back, it sets me back. Putting it down in writing also got me to visualize the trip, and I can see that the right course of action may just be to make sure I keep my shit as tight as possible and act as though I was already the 2019 version of myself. Perhaps I can get her to put our itinerary in writing and then go over it together each morning -- a way of subtly involving myself in it, or at least never having to ask "what are we doing this afternoon?"

Anyway. I don't see much discussion of this sort of thing, so I figured it was worth throwing it out there for you folks to chew over. Anybody got any suggestions, tips or anecdotes?