My first holiday with my children

Carly Woodland, Manager

Especially as I have two boys who NEVER seem to run out of energy. My eldest son Logan is turning 5 in a few months, and he’s never been on a holiday, he’s started asking in the last year when we can go on one. So after a few years of saying we would go away and then finding excuses not to, we finally bit the bullet and decided to go for it and book a holiday.

Pre-kids my husband Scott and I used to like going on holiday a few times a year, especially cruises (no, they aren’t just for old people!) where we could see multiple counties over the week or two we were away. We decided to play it safe for the first holiday with our children and booked a week in south Devon staying in a cottage, with the hope that we will have a great time and it would give us the confidence to book a holiday abroad next year.

The journey there and back was the main bit I was dreading. Logan gets bored after 10 minutes in the car, so I wasn’t sure how this was going to go on a four-hour journey. Despite being told we would need to stop off 2 or 3 times we only wanted to stop off once, halfway, at Dyrham Park near Bristol so the kids could run off some energy for a couple of hours.

We hit traffic before we had even left our hometown and overall, the journey took us about six hours instead of four, which wasn’t ideal. I had a big bag of snacks and brought some new travel- friendly toys and the boys were both really good all the way there, not any moaning at all which was a pleasant surprise.

We arrived at our cottage on a farm in the Devon countryside and the view was amazing, you could see for miles and there were lots of animals around. Seeing the boys so excited I felt a pang of guilt I’d not taken them away sooner. We had a hot tub at the cottage and Logan wanted to go straight in, seeing his happy face was everything. Mason is only 18 months so he couldn’t go in but was happy splashing at the sides.

After dinner we attempted bedtime. Mason (who is usually an amazing sleeper) had been going through a sleep
regression so for the week prior to the holiday had been crying for 1-2 hours at bedtime so we were already anticipating our evening wouldn’t be the relaxing one we hope for when we booked the holiday. Logan decided he wanted to go home so we had an hour-long battle persuading him that we couldn’t drive home and eventually he decided to go to bed, and we could finally relax.

We then had three days of fun in the sunshine, visiting various places around Devon spending time on the beach, playing in the arcades, and plenty of nice food out – you can’t go to the seaside without having fish and chips and lots of ice creams. We also visited my Grandad who is in his 80s and moved down to Devon after my Nan passed away. We were all very excited to see him as we hadn’t seen him since last September and spent a lovely day in Westward Ho with him.

The kids were loving every minute of it and by the end of the week Masons sleep regression seemed to be over as he finally went to sleep nicely on the last night, and Logan didn’t want to go home on Friday morning when we set off back home which was a change from the first night.

I’m not really sure why I was so worried about taking my children on holiday, I thought this blog was going to be about how stressful it was with a few horror stories. But it was a lovely week, the biggest drama was a seagull stealing Scott’s lunch so overall was an enjoyable time. We did feel very tired as the holiday was all about entertaining the kids and they stayed up later than usual every evening, so we didn’t get much time to relax. It was lovely to spend so much time with Logan and Mason as I do get very bad ‘Mum-guilt’ about having to work and not getting enough time with them.

We asked Logan what his favourite part of the holiday was, and he said ‘spending time with Mummy and Daddy’ which was the best answer he could have given. We did double check he didn’t mean all the treats and ice creams or going on the beach, but he was sure it was time with us. We are already looking to book our next holiday as we can’t wait to make more memories as a family, hopefully abroad, so there might be a follow up blog on my experience travelling abroad with my kids!