Colouring outside the lines. Slipping beyond the boundaries. Leaving schedules shivering in the morning chill as the plane takes off for sunnier places. Forgetting the routine that wraps up the day during the rest of the year. That's the theory anyway. But as soon as we arrived in Spain, I realised boundaries were up for discussion at every turn. We needed ...
What’s your ideal holiday? If you had asked me ten years ago, the answer was easy. Reading good books, getting some sun, sleeping in, eating out. Basically relaxing. I didn’t need to go to the warmest beach or the hottest club – my needs were simple. Or so I thought. Until I first tried holidaying ...
From the first pain of the first contraction, parenting is interlaced with self-sacrifice and doing all sorts of things you'd never do if you didn't have kids. For me, going to a theme park or fairground (or The Merries as we called them when I was a child) ticks that box, and self-sacrifice is exactly ...
Have you ever been the last one to read the book everyone's raving about - The Girl on the Train or Gone Girl maybe? Going to Cambrils Park in Northern Spain was a bit like that for me - at least a dozen people had told me how fantastic it is, and I arrived worrying that ...
When I go on holidays, and I do what lots of people do – I put photos up on Facebook. It’s the modern version of the postcard isn’t it – “Having a lovely time, wish you were here!” So here’s the Facebook version of one holiday, as told through the photos I posted on social media: There was ...
Once upon a time, booking a trip meant googling and trip-advisoring and searching and checking and reading every single review on the internet before finally deciding on what we hoped would be the perfect spot. But now, there’s no time for researching, and short-cuts are required, so my new modus operandi is to take the first ...
Back when I had two-under-two, I found that going anywhere further than the local shop was a challenge. Actually, even going to the local shop was a challenge. So when the smallest was nine weeks old, and the biggest was a whopping 23 months old, we were understandably nervous setting off on our very first ...
Sometimes I hide my phone from myself for an hour, so that I can concentrate on the kids without being distracted. And I have some reasonably strict self-imposed rules about not browsing mindlessly when they're around. But one major weakness is taking photos - and it's for that purpose more than any other, that my ...
Long, long ago, on a campsite far, far away, I met a holiday friend called Claire. She had long brown hair and was from Ireland or England – I wasn’t old enough to distinguish accents. I had spent two days sitting on the steps of our mobile home looking across at her, and she’d spent ...
For five years in a row, we took the ferry to France, then last year, for the first time since having kids, we braved getting on a plane, and we did it again this year. Throughout the journey, I couldn't help comparing flight and ferry in my head, so in case you've only done one ...