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.

The Airport Experience

  

Following on from my previous post about my daughter leaving for a six month university exchange program during the past week, I thought I should share that I am still intact after the goodbye process!

When she first mentioned about a year or more ago that she was planning to go on exchange, I remember thinking that it was so far off that it wasn’t even worth me worrying about.  Anything could change – she may not be accepted, she may decide not to apply after all etc, but now looking back, I am amazed at how fast the time went, and there we were Thursday night saying our goodbyes.

If you’ve ever flown out of Australia, you’ll know you need to complete a departure card to present to Customs as you go through.  The funniest thing about Thursday night was that as she completed that green departure card while we sat with family and friends having a coffee, it suddenly hit her that she was leaving for six months! “Oh my goodness,” she exclaimed to us all. “I’ve just filled in the ‘intended length of stay overseas’ section and I’ve written six months!!!”

We all laughed and I even took a photo to share on this post as I thought it was quite a poignant moment in the whole experience!

Earlier this week I was talking with a girlfriend about the experience she had when her eldest child recently got married. Even though she was really happy for him and loved the girl he was marrying, on the night before the wedding, she had a real melt down where she literally cried for hours and was a complete mess. She was fine the next day for the wedding, but it was as if she needed to go through that process to help her come to terms with the reality of entrusting the care of her son to another woman.

I think this is a natural part of the parental process. We know in our minds that our children aren’t going to stay with us for the rest of their lives, but when the time comes for the actual separation, particularly with the first child to leave, we may not be as prepared for that moment as we might think.  It’s caused me to spend time this week looking back over the years I spent with my daughter as she was growing up and wondering if I could have done things better.

Whether it’s our children leaving to get married, going to live in another country or just moving out to their own apartment, the reality is that things have changed in the relationship. Their stage of independence has reached a new level. It doesn’t mean that they won’t still need us or seek our advice or help, but they no longer need us in the way that they once did.

Coming to terms with this is something as parents we will all need to do at some stage of our lives. You may find yourselves with younger children right now and my advice is to enjoy them while they are in that stage of life because the years will pass quickly, and before you know it, the season will change and you will be waving them off.  Every day we are given with them is precious so make the most of each one. Take the time to enjoy your family; do things that they want to do that may not always be convenient for you.

When they are older, the special things you did will be what they remember, not how much housework got done.  And as you go through the natural separation process when the time comes (in my case the airport experience), hopefully you can look back and have no regrets.

Creating Family Memories

What can you remember about your childhood? No doubt several things will come to mind – some will be bad, but hopefully there are some good memories tucked away in there somewhere as well.

I believe that one of the most important parts of being a parent is to create happy memories that your children can look back at and smile upon.  Sure, there will always be housework, cooking and your career to think about, but it doesn’t take long to create something that your kids will remember.

To start with, a really good idea is to keep a special journal of all the things that your kids have said, done, enjoyed/disliked over the years that they can read back over as they get older.

I have kept a book that my kids still call ‘The Takle Family Memories’ in which I included things such as what they loved most about a holiday we had been on, exciting day trips, funny things they had said to each other or other people, words that they had for items that weren’t quite right ( Asher called a blanket a ‘blank-let’ and Holly called a nightie a ‘nighting-gown’ for years!)

These are the sorts of things that your children will enjoy reading about when they get older; things that you will probably forget as the years go by. Keeping all these memories together in written form will alleviate this. I have actually now taken all the things I’ve recorded and put them into a word document so that I can keep adding to it when the need arises, and also that way I will be able to give each of them a copy.

Over the years, we have done some really strange/funny things just to keep life interesting for the kids, and these are the things that they still talk about today.

They loved me telling them stories, but not reading stories, rather making them up. I created a whole Chinese family and told the kids stories of their antics – the main character’s name was Chop Suey and he was always getting into some sort of mischief but all the stories had some sort of moral or biblical principle to be shared. One activity that the kids did was to each draw all the members of Chop Suey’s family – it was so interesting to see what each child perceived the family to look like.

One night I wanted to give the kids home made fried rice for dinner and I wasn’t sure if they would eat it or not, so I started telling them in the morning that Chop Suey was coming for dinner that night. When night came and it was time for dinner, I dressed Jonathan up in a costume so that the other kids wouldn’t be able to tell it was him, and he knocked on the door and came in as Chop Suey to have dinner with us. I can still recall the looks on the Daniel, Asher and Holly’s faces as they welcomed their guest. Those sorts of things just take a little bit of imagination but are well worth the effort!

Another night when the kids had officially gone to bed, but lights were just out, I crawled to the door of the twins’ room so they wouldn’t see me and proceeded to throw shoes at them in the dark. They got such a shock at first and didn’t know where the shoes were coming from. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing though, so they soon knew it was me.

These are the simplest of things but the kids remember them – they will almost certainly not remember how many times you vacuumed, grocery shopped or how many loads of washing you did, but the little things that you go to the trouble of doing, just to make it fun, those are the things that will create happy childhood memories.