Well, we've just got back from a week's holiday in Dorset. Which is a long way from our home in Manchester, especially when the traffic jams double the length of the journey!
So I thought I'd share you my Gecko Top Tips for how to handle a holiday with children (ours are 5 and 7, for reference).
Here we go:
1. Don't forget to pack the coffee machine. Even if you have to leave one of the kids behind, you really can't spend a whole week without decent coffee. You just can't.
2. Don't forget to pack some wine. This is almost as important as the coffee machine. But not quite, as it is likely there will be some form of shop in the vicinity of where you are staying that will be able to sell you some wine. But it's better to take some with you, just in case.
3. If you don't have them already, get DVD players for the car. And headphones. The headphones are very important. We spent a 9 hour car journey with hardly any interruptions from the back of the car because they were quite content to watch the SAME FILM on repeat. For 9 hours. And we couldn't hear it because of the headphones. Perfect!
4. Remortgage your house before you go, so you'll be able to afford all the extortionate entry fees into the tourist attractions.
5. Remember to smile sweetly when your darling children would rather play on the playground than actually look at the really exciting monkeys you paid a lot of money to see (please see point 4). Apparently yelling "I did not pay £38 for you to play on a playground! Look at the sodding monkeys for 5 sodding minutes at least before you go down the slide!" makes you look like a lunatic.
6. Resign yourself to the fact that your children's diet will mostly consist of ice cream for the week. Which will, by the way, also almost bankrupt you, because it's fancy, locally made with milk from golden cows, tourist ice cream. And they'll only have about a third of it before deciding they're full / feel sick. Typical. (But on the plus side, at least you get to finish it off.)
7. Make sure you pack lots of plasters, because children who are stuffing their faces with ice cream can't see where they're going, and so they'll fall over. A lot.
8. If you can manage it, stay at a place with a hot tub. A hot tub will keep the kids entertained for ages with very little input required from you. Sure, there may be the occasional "she tried to drown me" incident to sort out, but on the whole that's a small price to pay for 10 minutes of peace.
9. Don't, whatever you do, try to visit any place that doesn't have at least 2 out of the following: an adventure playground, an ice cream shop, a beach, funfair rides. The continuous wailing of "you never take us anywhere nice, we never get to do what we want to do" will essentially make the whole trip miserable and you'll wish you hadn't bothered.
10. And last but not least, make sure you take and share lots of photos of your kids having fun and being cute, so you can make your non-holidaying friends jealous at how perfect your family holiday is. If you take enough photos, you can even convince yourself that you had an amazing time and that the kids were really well behaved - which is when you decide to do it all again next year!
(N.B: By the way, in case anyone is worried, we did actually have a lovely holiday in Dorset. We must have done - we have loads of photos of the kids having fun and being cute.)
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