Holiday Anyone?

     

Thinking about holidays makes many, if not most people happy, excited even. Holidays bring a sense of anticipation and are (usually) something to look forward to, offering an opportunity to relax and recuperate from day to day life.

If you have small children however, you may not feel that way. You may instead think it’s all too much hard work, but I want to encourage you that the family holiday is a really important part of a child’s growing up years, creating memories that can’t be created in the normal routine of life.

When I was growing up, my family didn’t have many holidays, however I can clearly remember things that happened on the ones that we did have. I have fond memories of feeding mangoes to a cow named Daisy over the fence of a caravan park in Maryborough, Queensland – such a simple thing, but one that brought me much joy and an experience I couldn’t have had at my own home. I’d be willing to bet money that my parents wouldn’t recall that event, but to me it was a special time that I can still vividly bring to mind.

I’d really like to encourage you to take your children on holidays, no matter how young they may be.  I’m not necessarily suggesting a 5 star resort in Bora Bora . Even a simple and inexpensive camping trip can provide a holiday experience. After all, what it’s really about is not how much money you spend on a holiday, but rather doing different things to what you would normally do at home, and the memories you can create through these new experiences.

If you are interested in camping, I would recommend going onto E-Bay or to an outdoors store and investing in some decent equipment – the set up for this is the most costly part, but once you’ve got a tent and all the other bits and pieces you need, camping is an option whenever you have the opportunity.

If you prefer a little more luxury, there are plenty of family-friendly holiday places to go and finding them is as simple as typing your criteria into an internet search engine. There are also loads of sites that advertise discounted holiday accommodation such as http://www.getawaylounge.com.au or www.wotif.com.au

When our children we quite young (the youngest was not quite one and the oldest was six), we went on an adventure by driving from Melbourne to the Sunshine Coast. Some of you will be thinking that that would be a crazy venture – five small children in a car for a 2000 kilometer trip! It was actually a lot of fun. The kids all entertained each other for a lot of the time and sang songs from one of Colin Buchanan’s albums like there was no tomorrow!

We stayed at an apartment near the beach and enjoyed time together doing things we didn’t do in Melbourne; going to the beach, playing tennis, visiting grandparents etc. One of my most vivid memories from that trip has provided us with many laughs as we have recalled it over the years.

We were all in the lift going down to the basement car park and it was quite a full lift on that occasion, so we were all packed in fairly tightly.  My twin boys, who were three at the time, were somewhere in amongst all the bodies, and all of a sudden, from the middle of the crowd I heard a familiar voice loudly call, “Look!”

I knew it was one of my twins, and was immediately wondering what he had seen that had caught his attention. Everyone in the lift was also looking to see what it was, and his next words were rather unexpected, “My beautiful thongs!” They were new thongs, and he was clearly rather proud of them. Most of the adults in the lift were laughing – it was just so cute!

An important part of any family holiday is photographs. Over the years we’ve had several ‘photo nights’ where we’ve looked at all the photos we’ve taken and remembered the holidays and day trips that they were taken on.

Although it may be a little difficult to get away and it may take some advance financial and physical planning, a family holiday will hopefully be something you can all look back on together in years to come and recall happy memories. Even if you can only get away once every couple of years, it will still be well worth the effort.