Don\u2019t promise anything, but do plan many things. When kids are involved, starting a day without a plan is a dangerous game that rarely avoids bickering, cajoling and financial ruin. One experienced school-holiday survivalist (mum friend) said they always have a large visual calendar on the wall, which is great for deterring constant questioning. However, it does lay all your cards on the table. If you put \u201czoo\u201d on the calendar and wake that morning with four loads of washing strewn across your living room, an unexpected plumbing issue, a pressing email from your boss or just a lacklustre opinion of meerkats, then take your pick of whining, crying or aggressive outburst because you\u2019re getting at least one of those and potentially all three.<\/p>\n
I prefer to take the secret schedule approach: always have something in your mind for the day ahead but don\u2019t articulate it until absolutely necessary. Greet the day with the assumption that your children will get on with their lives, create their own fun, get lost in imaginary worlds, whimsy and wonder. And then when that doesn\u2019t pan out, you go to Plan B, your only real plan.<\/p>\n
There was a time in my life when I would have advocated for painting, fort-making, supervised carpentry. I\u2019ve frozen figurines in giant blocks of ice so my kids could liberate them with a hammer. I\u2019ve made multi-coloured playdough, cloud-dough and slime. We\u2019ve had Orbees, kinetic sand, melty beads and more, and they\u2019ve all made their way into the grooves in the floorboards, the deep recesses of the couch or \u2013 worst of all \u2013 the seatbelt mechanisms. Now, all these things reek of lockdown. The thought of them makes my face get hot, the walls start to close in and I picture myself scrubbing slime out of the carpet until I eventually drop dead. Now, I prefer to go out. Anywhere. Just out.<\/p>\n
Ditch the messy, elaborate crafts and simply get out of the house. <\/p>\n
The best thing about \u2018out\u2019 is that it can be anywhere except on your floor, your furniture, in your kitchen or within your walls. All those things are safe when you\u2019re out. When your kid eats a sausage from Mitre10, supporting the Scout Jamboree, and wipes their tomato sauce hands on the wall, it\u2019s not your wall, it\u2019s a concrete pillar. Sure, it\u2019s disgusting, but if you haven\u2019t realised kids are disgusting yet, there\u2019s no way you\u2019re surviving the school holidays.<\/p>\n
A cheap winter holiday out that I enjoy is the library. It makes you feel really good about your parenting. Even if the kids don\u2019t read a single book you check out and in a month you have to turn the house upside down to find them again, it\u2019s worth it for the momentary self-satisfaction. Plus, I love librarians \u2013 they\u2019re always offering activities in the holidays that they seem genuinely thrilled you\u2019re attending. The museum also slaps and one of the few places that your kids will almost certainly have memories of when they\u2019re adults and not only because of the mild trauma of the volcano house. Nearly all of us raised in Auckland count visiting Centennial Street \u2013 lest we forget \u2013 among our core memories.<\/p>\n
If you must stay in, you must also surrender to chaos and mess. Embrace it. Get out the board games and let the cheating, fighting and meltdowns ensue. One of my fondest school holiday memories is answering my landline phone to hear a family friend rap \u201cPyjama jammie jam, will you be there, my man?\u201d An invitation to come over for a Monopoly, Milo and pyjama day.<\/p>\n
When I asked my children what I should say about surviving the school holidays, my eldest, who\u2019s 12, said: \u201cDon\u2019t try to control your children too much \u2026 just set limitations and let them do their own thing.\u201d She obviously subscribes to the Jonathan Haidt philosophy of childhood \u2013 let them roam neighbourhoods and get up to mischief \u2013 in reality, her idea of \u201ctheir own thing\u201d is almost certainly something facilitated by me or YouTube shorts. Still, she sounded mature and I was taken aback for a moment. Soon she\u2019ll be a teenager and the school holidays will look very different. I\u2019ll say \u201cThe mall? Can I come?\u201d or \u201cKnock, knock. You okay? Can I get you anything?\u201d and if I\u2019m lucky, she\u2019ll acknowledge I\u2019m there.<\/p>\n
I recently heard Brandi Carlile on a podcast describing her song You Without Me. It\u2019s about the glimpses you get of your children as they are when you\u2019re not around \u2013 the independent person they are growing into: \u201cThere you are, my morning star, I wondered when you\u2019d show. Give me just a quick thumbs up, a wink before you go.\u201d When she played it, I cried. And when my daughter gave me her parenting advice, I thought \u201cthere you are, my morning star\u201d and immediately felt an urgency to spend as much time with her as possible these holidays. <\/p>\n
I guess this means I\u2019m almost out of the trenches. Don\u2019t get me wrong, the holidays require grit, however old your children are, but survival? I know it\u2019s annoying to say when you\u2019ve got blood, sweat and tears on your ripped fatigues, but the phase is fleeting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t promise anything, but do plan many things. When kids are involved, starting a day without a plan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499282,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1665,38119,32502,307,156,28161,200259,5267,249586,305,2956,10053,221,809,1899,17576,5812,5829,111,139,69,3766,143462,4062,29677,57816,249584,223,165,210,61,1533,23644,102,1959,249585],"class_list":["post-499281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-advice","tag-approaching","tag-dare","tag-dont","tag-entertainment","tag-expectations","tag-gillespies","tag-goal","tag-hardwon","tag-have","tag-holidays","tag-house","tag-how","tag-keep","tag-kids","tag-low","tag-make","tag-many","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-parents","tag-sanity","tag-school","tag-slime","tag-survive","tag-tact","tag-the","tag-their","tag-through","tag-to","tag-will","tag-winter","tag-with","tag-your","tag-zanna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}