With Geoff as a teacher and now me as a mum/working from home, we finally have a long summer holiday that overlaps. Claire is grunting away in her cot where I hope she will make it to 11am. Geoff is on his ipad playing some kind of game and drinking an enormous coffee. I am in the study, moseying about on the computer with my empty cup beside me after an excellent sleep-in where I was out about as cold as you can get. I love lazy mornings.

Later this month we are going away for four days for our first ‘family holiday’. I let myself be controlled by my spend thrift, tight ass brain and it nearly didn’t happen. We need to make these memories.

Some of my fondest memories are of family holidays, some of them are bitter and akin to gale force winds while camping with wombats shoving their faces and bums at you through a tent, all out wars over board games and endless maths homework in the retro’est of shacks with the worst weather while being sick. But most of them are of togetherness, fun, family, seeing new places and trying new things. Of climbing the Pinnacle in the Grampians. Of hiking up the top of a mountain in the Flinders ranges – just me and dad, of lying on the beach in Mallacoota scouring the paper to see if I’d made it in for a study score over 40, of canasta and 500, of tenting with Laura while the rest of the family were in a caravan, of lazy afternoons reading on the beach, icecream in Sorrento, walking the back-beach in Rye, damper and campfires and marshmallows and bagpipes in the middle of nowhere, of walks by myself in early morning up lonely hills, roadtrips with time passing games, and card game after board game after card game.

My family did holidays real good. I’d like to do the same.

 

Holidays Life