The Joy of School Holidays

You may have heard that school holidays are for the mental health of teachers. This is not true. Nothing can save their mental health.

School holidays are for you - the parent.

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Holidays free you of the tyranny of the morning school bell, allowing you abundance of time to relax, forget the pressures of the adult world and join your two children (aged six and eight) in holiday pursuits.

Top of the list is eating. After you clear the breakfast dishes, and sweep up spilled rice bubbles, the children invade the kitchen and concoct a glutton snack for themselves and their three hungry friends. You may have time to clean the kitchen again before they return.

During holidays, children eat five quarterly meals per day, plus morning and afternoon tea.

Between meals, you buy new school shoes. Your children deliberately grew out of their last pair. Their punishment is to sit in the children's shoe department, with nothing to eat or drink, until you can find a shop assistant who is free.

No school holiday is perfect without a movie. Your children's choice of movie coincides with every other child's in the city. The queue is so long, it changes the direction of the wind.

Once seated in the cinema, your six-year-old cannot see over the lady in front. If he stands on the seat, the population behind him complain, so you sit him on your lap and you can't see and your legs go to sleep.

During the movie, six-year-old must go to the toilet - no, he can't wait - and you tell eight-year-old where you are going - no, he won't stay in the cinema alone.

Your seats are 25 pairs of feet from the aisle. Then you stumble in the dark to the door, tripping on concealed steps.

While you are outside, you miss the climax of the movie, and you never know who stole Bambi's roller skates.

You return, trying to focus your eyes in the dark, and confused by three differing opinions about where your seats are. After the third try, you find them, along with a greater respect for six-year-old's sense of direction.

When he is located on your lap again, he asks for a drink.

On other days, you opt for outdoor activities, such as the picnic, the aim of which is to give children space to run and jump and yell. And teach them about nature.

You don't have to do anything, as nature is very aggressive. Sandflies and ants bite, bindies spike, shrubs scratch, the sun burns and when the children trip over, it is into a patch of wet clay.

You can join in the picnic games - find the ball when it rolls into the clump of prickly bushes, catch children who fall off the top of the glossy dip, football tackle children who stand in front of a loaded swing and salvage those who drop into the river.

... Like all good things, school holidays end. The children reluctantly leave your side, knowing how much you will miss them.

Comfort them.

Tell them you won't have time to be lonely.

You'll be mental of what you can all do together next school holidays.

End

The Joy of School Holidays