Week 8 and 9

It’s been a long old time since I posted: it’s been the Easter holidays! It turns out, looking after all three of them all the time without any major plans…well, it’s draining. Good, but draining. We did a whole bunch of stuff and I want to go through and actually give each thing time to breathe.

The Philosophy Behind our Easter Holiday

That’s probably a little grandiose, but we decided that we’d stay at home for the Easter holidays (all two weeks of them) and not go on any ‘proper’ holiday. However, we had a brief look and found that a holiday would cost about £2,000 for all of us, and so reasoned that we could spend something like £100 a day on day trips and similar in order to create a comparable ‘home’ holiday. We didn’t quite manage to spend that much, but we put together a board showing every day, and created cards that we could stick (as a family) on the board to work out what we were going to do.

Highlights

I’ll not go through all of the things we did, but I’d like to call out some highlights. I managed to burn my head quite badly given the wonderful weather when we went to Piglets. We had some temper based problems but there were a few moments of brilliance: sitting in the sunshine having an ice-cream while the two eldest children played in the sand was magnificent. They fed lambs and did Easter egg hunts and all sorts of ‘proper’ activities but it was the self-directed playing in the sand with water and sunshine that was brilliant.

The four-year-old maintains that the family swim was her best thing - I don’t know why she thinks that, and there were no signs that it was going to be her favourite but she continues to maintain that swimming is her favourite.

Gymnastics was such a highlight that we ended up going twice (again on the final Sunday) - both of them love bouncing and jumping into foam pits and generally getting a little crazy.

The Easter egg hunt was a lot of fun and they’ve ended up with more chocolate than they could eat before Halloween. Hopefully they won’t notice the odd bit of egg disappearing.

I had a very strange bout of potential diverticulitis on my birthday (or actually on the 3rd, but it extended to movie day on the Saturday) - one day of pretty intense pain and tiredness and then nothing. By Monday at Monk’s Cross (for clip and climb) I was fine.

The playground at Beningborough Hall was brilliant and the kids occupied themselves for a couple of hours, chasing after other children and building dens and testing themselves. And the playdate was an unexpected and wonderful highlight - both big children had a great time and the four-year-old cried all the way home because she never wanted to leave.

Finally, the Deep was a proper trek but the eldest absolutely loves it - he’s been a couple of times with school and was delighted to be able to play the tour guide and tell us where all the things are were and what we should see.

Lowlights

Having soup for my birthday was pretty low - we’d planned a takeaway and drinks and a film and instead I had soup and an early night. As a treat, I managed a tin of rice pudding. Not my finest birthday.

We all fell out over shoe shopping at Monks Cross - it turns out picking shoes with 3 tired and bickering children after nearly two weeks of activity is not likely to work well.

We just didn’t have the energy or time to go to the Royal Armouries Museum, Lightwater Valley, Dig, an Indian Restaurant, or Yorkshire Wildlife Park. I’m not really sad about that - the only one I wished we’d done was an Indian. I just think the kids are of an age and a temperament where I think they’d handle going to a proper restaurant pretty well. But I’m not certain, and I’d like to try it.

Next Holidays

Next half-term we’re going on a proper abroad holiday, and I think that’s going to be pretty good. However, it was nice to have a ‘stay-at-home’ holiday and get to do a whole bunch of activities as a five. Exhausting, but nice. I’m a little wary of the summer holidays - we don’t have any plans and I’ll be back working. I’ve told my wife that I don’t envy her and that I strongly suggest she get help, plans, and anything that’ll help see her through the six weeks.