It’s summer holiday season and that means parents everywhere are drinking more wine in the evenings to celebrate making it through another day.
And, before you all start commenting about how people should love spending time with their own children, they do, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy.
15 Thoughts All Parents Have During The Summer Holidays
The summer holidays are full of emotional highs and lows – heart overflowing with pride one minute only to feel publicly mortified by your child’s behaviour the next.
Six weeks is a long time, whether you’re spending each and every day with them or trying to juggle holiday childcare with your regular job – the summer holidays add a little extra stress to family life.
Here are 15 thoughts all parents have during the summer holidays:
#1: School’s Out For Summer!
It’s impossible to acknowledge the end of term without singing a little bit of Alice Cooper’s anthem.
As your kids arrive home from school with bags overflowing with a year’s worth of arts and crafts, you are likely to feel excited about the next six weeks.
No more school stress, no more ironing school uniforms, no more 8am panic searches to find missing school shoes. For the next six weeks, you can slow down and enjoy spending some real quality time with your kids.
#2: Time To Bond
Without the interruption of school, you’ll have six long weeks to spend some real time with your kids. They won’t be spending most of their day at school, instead, they’ll be busy hanging out with you.
Finally, a decent chance to really get to know the amazing little humans you created.
#3: We Are Going To…
…go to the beach, go to the cinema, go to the museum, climb trees, swim in rivers, get covered in mud, go for walks, make a bug hotel, do some baking… you’ll have big plans. Big, big plans.
You’ll write them all down frantically while wondering how you’ll ever manage to fit so much fun into just six weeks!
#4: What Happened To My House?
It’s 8am on the first day of the holidays and your house is already trashed. The sofa cushions are covered in yoghurt, the craft supplies are all over the floor and your entire house seems to be carpeted in Lego. Did I mention it’s not even 8am?
Sometime around now you should realise that, scrap the school holiday bucket list, you’ll actually be spending the next six weeks trying to tidy your house.
#5: They’re Eating Me Out Of House And Home
Sometime around the second day of the holidays you will run out of snacks. The cupboards full of biscuits, crisps, nuts and rice cakes you bought to last the holidays are now empty. Even the crumbs have been pilfered.
The fruit bowl is empty, the salad drawer is empty, pretty much the entire kitchen is empty apart from the apparently starving children crawling across the countertops in a desperate attempt to find food.
#6: Why Do They All Have So Much Energy?
Day one of the holidays, you’re on an energy overload. By day two, you’re starting to flag but you keep it up for the kids. Day three, you have to go for a nap after lunch. By day four, you’re basically in a coma and can’t understand how your kids are still going.
Don’t they need down time or rest? How can they not be exhausted? You’ll start Googling high energy foods and eliminating all of the foods from your kids diet in the hope of placating them, just a little.
#7: Why Did I Just Spend All That Money?
You spend an absolute fortune on a family day out over the holidays. Entrance tickets, souvenirs, lunch – the whole shebang. And guess which bit the kids love best? The bus journey.
Yep, you could’ve skipped the rest of the day and just taken them on the bus. It woul’ve cost less and they’d have just as much fun. Kids, it turns out, are easily entertained.
#8: Is It Too Late To Remortgage The House?
One week into the holidays, you’ll be breaking open the piggy bank to try and scrape together enough money for a day out. Why does everything cost so much? Even a simple trip to the museum costs a fortune by the time you’ve factored in transport and food for everyone. And that’s before you get to the gift shop.
You’ll run out of money by the end of the first week and then cry yourself to sleep wondering how you’re going to make it through the rest of the holidays without any money to use to bribe your kids to behave.
#9: Look At My Kids, They Love Each Other
With six long weeks, your kids will probably accidentally show kindness towards each other at some point.
They’ll think you’re not looking, of course, but you’ll see it. A sweet moment of sharing or cuddling or compassion between two people who are usually engaged in world war three with each other. Your heart will be fit to burst as you see the little people you love most in the world being nice to one another.
#10: Why Do My Kids Hate Each Other?
The holidays are six weeks long. Your kids will spend most of this time furiously hating each other for ‘looking at me’, ‘breathing noisily’ and ‘ruining my game’.
The twenty seconds of kindness mentioned above? Yeah, that was your lot. The rest of the holidays will just be you counting down to wine o’clock while repeatedly screeching ‘I don’t care who started it.’
#11: Let’s Go Screen-Free
Remembering the summer holidays of your own childhood? Long sunny days spent climbing trees and swimming in lakes. You decide to introduce your children to the joys of the natural world. They spend too much time in front of the TV anyway.
Hell, you’ll think, why don’t we go completely screen free? No phones, no laptops, no tablets, just the serenity and peacefulness or the sun beating down on our skin as we get acquainted with mother nature.
#12: Just One More Movie
Screen free. Ha. Maybe for a day. Perhaps two, at a push. Certainly not a whole summer holiday. The television is a great way to stop your kids waking you up at 6am, stop them arguing about where to go and stop them all turning into demons while they wait for dinner to be ready.
Yeah, screen-free would be great, ideal even, if you had a normal family, but as it stands, one more movie isn’t going to hurt anyone, is it?
#13: Why Are My Children So Loud?
By the second week of the holidays, you’ll be sending handwritten sorry notes to the rest of the neighbourhood to apologise for the ruckus your brood makes from 6am until 9pm at night.
Shouting, screaming, jumping, banging, playing the recorder, falling out, laughing…they can’t do anything quietly. Even their whispers could wake somebody sleeping three streets away. By the end of the six weeks, you’ll have forgotten what silence sounds like (reminder: it’s amazing).
#14: How Many Days Left?
You love your kids, really you do. They’re fun and awesome and hilarious and…great in small doses. Six weeks is not a small dose. If anything, it’s a little on the large side.
Even the happiest most holiday-loving parent will find themselves at least once a day secretly counting down the days until the new term starts.
#15: I’ve Had The Best Summer
And, in true parenting style, by the time the holidays are over, you’ll already have forgotten how long they were. By the time your kids have gotten dressed in their school uniforms, brushed their teeth and put on their shoes, you’ll be close to tears that the holidays are well and truly over.
You’ll forget the bickering and the mess and the noise, you’ll be completely in denial they weren’t six long weeks of family bliss.
As you kiss them goodbye at the school gates, you’ll begin the countdown to the next school holidays, so you can enjoy some uninterrupted quality time with your kids again.
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