How to avoid making the same game changing holiday errors we made
We spent a week in an idyllic little seaside hamlet in South Cornwall and to cut a long story short it was one of the hardest weeks of our lives. If you want to avoid the long story entirely then skip to the Top Tips at the end.
If you’re nosey and want to laugh/cry about our epic fails then read on. You may read it and think ‘No sh*t, Sherlock, why didn’t they think of that before the holiday?’ Perhaps we were naive but, try as we might, we just couldn’t plan for every eventuality.
In brief, I will explain our game changing holiday errors:
1. We did not bring a specialist travel bed for Rufus.
2. We travelled 300 miles in one day on roughly 2 hours sleep (the baby woke an unbelievable amount of times that night) because we had set ourselves the challenge of doing it and were determined.
3. On day 2 of the holiday our eldest daughter’s attitude was so awful that, in a moment of madness (probably a reaction caused by being hideously sleep deprived), I banned all screen time from her for the rest of the holiday.
4. In our sleep deprived states, both Dan and I assumed each other had given Rufus his daily medication to prevent constipation and also failed to make sure he drank enough water throughout the holiday.
5. We were fixated on making particular memories and put unnecessary pressure on ourselves to make a picture perfect memory.
Now I will explain the effect each error had on the rest of the holiday and the following days and weeks (warning: this bit’s quite long):
The paragraph below is enough to make you wonder why we would ever go on holiday again and in all honesty, if we had just brought a specialist travel bed with us instead of the stupid bed tent (which I was more than ready to throw out of the window into the Cornish sea) maybe the rest of the ‘holiday errors’ wouldn’t have even occurred.
1. Not bringing a specialist travel bed meant that Rufus escaped several times on the first few nights, despite us going to every effort to keep him zipped in. We moved furniture around in his bedroom and wedged things up against the zip side. He found a small gap between the tent material and the mattress and slid out from underneath, at one point getting his head stuck inside the tent while his body was stuck outside. We were both utterly exhausted from the night before the journey, the journey itself and now two nights in a row of putting Rufus back to bed over and over, watching the monitor like a hawk and worrying that he was going to escape again. We packed the bed tent away and put him to sleep in the only other thing we had to hand which we knew would keep him safe. It was a toddler version of a pop up beach tent with a zip. He could lie down in it comfortably but for some reason he still wasn’t sleeping and was shouting out and getting upset. After another restless night of watching him on the monitor, waiting for him to fall asleep and tending to him we realised that he was getting too hot being in such a confined space so he ended up having a febrile convulsion in Dan’s arms from overheating. In the end, the only option left was to put him in the baby’s travel cot and have the baby sleep in our bed with us. Yes he was safe and he couldn’t overheat but he spent the remaining nights of the holiday pulling himself up against the sides, banging around and pulling at everything within his reach and barely slept a wink. Nor did we.
2. Travelling 300 miles on two hours sleep meant that we arrived at our holiday destination tired (as many families do) but trusting that with a good night’s sleep we would feel ready to begin to enjoy the holiday properly the next day. See above bullet point for why relying on an upcoming ‘good night’s sleep’ is not a good enough reason to try and cram that many miles into a journey when you are already tired. Being determined and setting yourself challenges are great and all but totally, totally unnecessary sometimes.
3. Even though our eldest daughter said some pretty horrible things and had a stinking attitude on the second day, banning screentime was a TERRIBLE idea of mine! I was so angry with one of the things she said (which usually I would just pass off as a silly 6 year old comment, tell her not to speak like that and move on, but... sleep deprivation!) that I just flipped and punished her in the way I knew it would hurt most: no screentime. But I had absolutely failed to think what this would mean for the many ‘in between moments’ on holiday. You know, the early mornings, the after dinner chill when you just need some ‘hands off’ parenting time and with the only television in the house being in the main family room, it meant no television for her... or for Rufus, which is just not good. I hadn’t anticipated how sad this would make her that her brother got to watch the iPad but she didn’t and that actually I didn’t really want her to feel sad on holiday, I just wanted her to feel a small amount of remorse for what she said for a finite amount of time and then for everything to be forgiven and forgotten.
4. Not ensuring that Rufus had his constipation meds and enough water every single day resulted in extreme constipation. Unfortunately he ended up in so much pain with constipation that two days after we returned from the holiday, we had to take him into hospital for an enema. It was so bad that the first enema didn’t work and two days later he had to have another. The pain this caused for him and the time spent in hospital could have been so easily avoided if we had just been more vigilant with his medication.
5. Trying to create and recreate picture perfect memories is just silly. The best memories are usually from unexpected, unplanned moments and just because something worked well one year, doesn’t mean it is going to work well again. Last year we went to Cornwall and we have a lovely photograph of our eldest enjoying a Cornish cream tea so thought it would be nice to do something similar this year, however, we hadn’t anticipated that she would no longer like the taste and texture of a cream tea. Having chosen an idyllic outdoor spot by a beautiful beach in an expensive restaurant and ordered a round of cream teas, we were then met by a swarm of hungry wasps and a daughter who rejected her very expensive cream tea and decided to go into a sulk because there was nothing else she wanted on the menu. Between Dan and I trying to coax her into eating the ruddy thing and her refusing point blank to even try it, we got into such a pickle that we eventually abandoned ship and stormed back to the car.
It took us 7 weeks before we decided to sit down to look at, edit and print out our holiday photos. The bad memories, followed by the hospital trips and weeks of recovering from such a limited amount of sleep had a huge impact on both of us, to the point where we discussed on the (even longer) journey home whether to even go on holiday as a family again next year. But as we know, time is a healer, and we have decided that we can and WILL go on holiday again but this time, these will be our golden rules. You are probably more sensible than us but if they help you too, you’re welcome.
Top tips
1. If your child sleeps in a specialist bed at home then they need a specialist bed on holiday. Get one, whatever the price (thankfully there is funding available for these beds) and try it out at home first to make sure it really is escape-proof.
2. Go to bed early the night before, and go easy on the journey there and back. If you feel too tired to travel then leave later, plan to arrive the following day or break the journey up (obviously this doesn’t work if you have a plane to catch!).
3. Don’t ever ban screen time on holiday. Just don’t do it. Ever.
4. Be vigilant on medication and water intake and write a daily checklist to tick off what has been taken and when. We now know that being tired, out of routine and away from home means it is all too easy to forget.
5. Let memories create themselves and don’t get hung up if things don’t look picture perfect or if the holiday photos look nothing like you were expecting them to.
