School holidays fly by with the right kind of breakdown
Easter Weekend is over, and we’re left with discarded bits of half chewed chocolate, scattered throughout the house.
Thankfully, we’ve also been left with a couple of six-year-olds on Easter holidays to Hoover them up.
The same two excitable children who have a full 12 days before they go back to school, giving us plenty of precious time to spend with them.
The only problem is there’s only so much ‘precious’ you can take, when they’re fighting each other in the kitchen, and you’re trying to make lunch.
To help with the feeling of helplessness at the start of a school holiday, I’ve adopted a new philosophy of breaking everything down into a step at a time and managing expectations.
The goal of this approach is to achieve happiness for the children with the minimum of emotional trauma and cost for the parent. For example, there are 12 days to fill, and we’re at the grandparents for four of them, leaving us with only eight.
Already it sounds more manageable, and one of those days can be a nice day out at the seaside, and a trip to a National Trust place, where we can smuggle sandwiches in.
This leaves six days and we remove one by arranging a playdate with a friend at their house.
The final tally is five and for this I’ve broken everything down into it is your friend an hourly approach to make it easier to digest.
They’re up at 7am and in bed, or at least their bedroom at 8pm, so 13 hours to fill.
The first hour is swallowed with a simple breakfast of porridge, followed by a shop bought little pancake. And then we have teeth cleaning, getting dressed, fighting, some crying, more fighting and this usually takes another hour.
By this point, we’re two hours down, and I haven’t even mentioned the television, but I will now because it’s your friend. In a perfect world, they wouldn’t be watching talking animals, ghost dogs or cocky Australian children, but it’s not and they’re happy.
The downtime lasts an hour before they start getting restless and building dens, and I just like to shut the door and leave them to make the den of their dreams, until lunchtime, which we keep to something involving processed carbohydrates and beans.
By now it’s 1pm and I budget for two soft play sessions and three free trips to the local park.
Once they’re out the way, it’s the evening meal, which rotates between pizza, sausages, pasta, nuggets and it’s 6pm.
More television for the final couple of hours before bed and repeat for the other four days.
All of a sudden, they’re back in school and you’ll have all the time you need to plan how to fill six weeks of summer.
Lunchtime is something involving processed carbohydrates and beans