Week-by-week guide to the school holidays

11:42am Monday 28th July 2008

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School holidays – they’re so predictable, you could set your blood pressure by them.

Normal and steady at the start, sky high and about to blow at the end.

Same with energy and enthusiasm – it s a downward slope.

The pattern goes something like this:

Week one You relish the chance to sleep in. The joyful realisation that for six whole weeks you don’t have to rise at 6.30am, make packed lunches, and spend an hour crow-barring the children out of bed. No more being dwarfed and scraped by giant 4x4s on the school run, no more evenings shouting: “Have you finished your homework? For the millionth time, turn that TV off!”

Week two After a relatively restful week, catching up on sleep and laundry, you’re full of beans, planning family days out – picnics on the beach, walks in the countryside and fun in the park. It’s a lot of effort – particularly as the children offer little in the way of help making sandwiches and loading up the car – but once you’re out it’s great.

Week three More days out – you’ve got hold of free tickets to a local historic house so that’s a must – if only you could get the children out of bed, breakfasted, dressed and ready to go before 2pm. And when they’re finally ready to leave the house they’re less than enthusiastic. “Do we have to?” they wail. “I’m tired.” You begin to think that allowing special holiday bedtime extensions was a bad idea. You manage to get them into the car by promising a McDonald’s on the way home.

Week four The idea of more days out fills you with dread. Tired of each other’s company, the children squeal “Can we take a friend?” and insist you ring round to find one. Being the height of the holiday season, this takes the best part of an hour before someone they “don’t really like but will be all right for an afternoon” eventually answers and agrees to come. The children start to name-drop the more well-known theme parks. You tell them in no uncertain terms that they are far too expensive, but they’ve seen an offer on a cereal box, two-for-one at Legoland. At the end of the week, you resort to the next best thing – ten-pin bowling. A discernible shift takes place – the children are dictating the terms.

Week five Having done what you swore not to do and taken the children to the local multi-screen followed by another visit to McDonalds, the overdraft is way beyond its limit, yet there’s still two weeks to go. You deliberately keep them up late – “Why go to bed now, it’s only 11pm, it’s the school holidays…” – hoping they will sleep in until well past midday so, by the time they’ve had breakfast and got organised, it will be too late to go anywhere.

Week six You dream about the day when you will wake up and not hear the words: “What have we got for breakfast? I don’t like these cereals.” A time when you are not subjected to the daily onslaught of: “What are we doing today?” followed by “Do we have to?” You’re counting the minutes until the start of the new term.