This week is fast becoming a favourite tradition in our house.
For one week during the summer holidays, we temporarily abandon the idea that Mary and I know what we’re doing and we let the children run the show. Everyone gets a day each. The owner of the day has free choice on breakfast, they choose an outing and also what we do for dinner. Breakfast cereal choices this week, for the kids at least, must be so sugary that it changes the colour of the milk.
In the past, the outings have included things like a day at the zoo or a trip to the swimming pool with the big slides. The three kids get first pick, then Mary and I choose our days according to whatever budget and energy levels remain after theirs.
Wednesday is usually set aside as a rest day, where we might stay in our pyjamas or have a movie day at home. We still try to make it different from a normal day, just without having to get into the car.
There are no hard and fast rules but nor is a complete free-for-all. We’d pull the reins in if somebody’s plans started looking financially irresponsible, but so far none of them have tried to book us a week in the Maldives.
One of my favourite things about it is seeing what they choose when the answer genuinely gets to be theirs. Their choices are becoming increasingly good little summaries of who they are as people.
An unexpected bonus is the build-up. For the last few bedtimes before the week starts, the kids talk excitedly about what everyone might choose. They change their own minds repeatedly and try to extract clues from us about what everybody else has planned.
I love this part.
I’ve realised that anticipation is probably part of the reason the week works so well. The holiday almost starts before we’ve gone anywhere. When we did Disney a couple of years ago, we debated not telling them until the day we were leaving, but thankfully we weren’t able to contain our excitement. I think a huge part of the experience is looking forward to what’s coming.
Granted, this week wasn’t quite Disney, but the anticipation felt just as good.
Usually we try to get the kids’ days out at the beginning of the week so we know where we stand financially when it comes to our own choices, but this year two of the three kids were restricted by available slots at their chosen activities.
Mary made a slightly different request this year. Rather than choosing a day of her own, she wanted to go the entire week without having to cook a meal at home. I told her she could have that as well as her day, but she wasn’t interested. Despite what her petite frame might suggest, given the choice between another activity or seven consecutive days of being fed good food — and lots of it — won comfortably.
This meant I was up first.
I have the balance of a new-born giraffe, so everyone was surprised when I chose ice skating for my outing. Mary and I hadn’t skated in years and only one of the kids had ever stood on ice before. With nobody feeling particularly confident, I was sent out first. My brief was to help everyone with their first few steps before sending them on their way.
The first signs that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing didn’t take long to appear. I stepped onto the ice and immediately started drifting backwards, agonisingly slowly, away from the children I was supposed to be helping.
I couldn’t figure out how to move to forward without smashing my teeth on the ice.
While I was trying to remember how to walk, Mary managed to get the kids some skating aids. They came in different forms depending on your height. Cian had a penguin, Grace had a snowman and Saorlaith had a polar bear. They don’t make anything for grown-ups, so I had to pretend I was teaching Cian how to skate while desperately clinging to his penguin.
Eventually we found a rhythm and Mary and I swapped between helping Cian and skating with the girls. Mary and I even got a couple of laps on our own while the children cheered from the side. We had a cheeky kiss as we passed them which they pretend to hate but I think they secretly love.
The session lasted 90 minutes and by the time it finished I was starting to get cocky. A very near miss where I accidentally grabbed a woman’s tit to stop myself falling cured the cockiness fairly quickly.
Thankfully she saw the funny side and we concluded day one of our holiday without any police involvement.
Day two was my eldest, Saorlaith. She’s nine now but acts nineteen, so she chose a train ride to Belfast for a shopping trip in the big city, with the Lego Store at the top of her hit list.
On the train we had a carriage completely to ourselves, which meant the kids had plenty of room to move around without annoying anybody. The train passes right by the end of Saorlaith’s best friend’s garden, so we rang ahead and told her to go outside. We went past in a flash but managed to spot her and take a blurry photograph through the window.
At some point Saorlaith dropped her bracelet and asked why it didn’t fly backwards before it hit the ground.
I could hardly believe my luck. My nine-year-old had voluntarily opened the door to a physics lecture.
It was a fantastic opportunity for me to explain Newton’s first law although before long, there was a lot of eye rolling, mostly from my wife, and I could see Saorlaith regretted ever opening her mouth.
Rather than flogging that dead horse any further, I suggested an experiment. At the next stop, right before the train restarted, they would jump as high as they could and see whether they landed farther down the carriage than where they’d started.
Once the conductor blew his whistle to show the track was clear, they started jumping up and down. The train pulled away at a snail’s pace, effectively ruining the experiment, but the children moved backwards anyway. Nothing to do with Mr Newton and everything to do with the fact they’d inadvertently jumped backwards themselves.
They thought it was the funniest thing that had ever happened.
We arrived in Belfast and our first planned stop was the Disney Store. Mary and I had been in the Disney Store in Dublin a couple of weeks earlier and had commented on how much the kids would love it, so I secretly planned our walk from the train station to pass Belfast’s version.
We got to where I thought it was, but couldn’t find it. Turns out it had closed a few years earlier.
Whoops!
Thankfully it had been intended as a surprise, so the kids weren’t upset. I just quietly abandoned the surprise and carried on walking.
We eventually made it to the Lego Store, where the £10 Nanny had given each of the kids before we left didn’t stretch particularly far. They kept coming back to us carrying increasingly large boxes, so I had to put the kibosh on it.
We gave them a budget, showed them what number they weren’t allowed to go over and sent them back out exploring. The two girls quickly found something suitable. Cian on the other hand took a bit more convincing. He wanted something that was already built. He couldn’t understand why a toy shop would sell a toy that wasn’t finished.
Have you ever seen the video of Borat shopping for cheese? Well that was Cian in the Lego Store.
C - “Is this one finished?”
D - “No. None of them are.”
C - “Is this one finished?”
D - “No, you have to build them all.”
C - “Is this one finished?”
D - “I can’t be any clearer Cian, every single toy in this shop needs built.”
C - “What about this one?”
We eventually left the Lego Store with two happy children and went on a mission to find Cian something that was already assembled. God help him if we ever take him to IKEA.
We tried a Little Wing for lunch but there was a thirty-minute wait, so we sauntered on until we found a nice café with some outdoor seating. The outdoor section was narrow and a couple had parked a pram directly across the walkway.
There wasn’t even a child in it, they were using it to hold their shopping.
Cian tripped over it, cut his elbow and spent the first ten minutes of lunch crying. The owner of the pram responded by giving us dirty looks, presumably because our injured four-year-old was ruining the ambience.
Over the course of lunch, another three people tripped over it, including a waitress carrying food. Every time somebody stumbled, the woman shook her head and then inspected the pram for damage.
At this stage I could have asked her to move it but my own children were safely seated and I had become emotionally invested in seeing who fell next.
I’d heard about a nice ice-cream place in Belfast, so rather than have dessert at the café we decided to walk there. This also allowed us to employ the universally accepted nutritional principle that if you walk fifteen minutes to get dessert, the dessert no longer counts towards your daily calories. a slow 10 minute walk burns 1500 calories, right?
We carried our ice creams to the alleyway behind the Duke of York pub and ate them under the neon umbrellas. The bench’s were reserved for Duke of York customers, so Mary was only too glad to order a drink.
Cian had bought a Sonic motorbike in the meantime and the kids started showing their new toys to random customers sitting around us. I kept trying to call them back because I was worried they were annoying people, but nobody seemed remotely bothered. Every person they approached reacted as though Cian’s Sonic motorbike was the coolest thing they’d ever seen.
I love that confidence in children. They haven’t yet learned the adult habit of assuming everybody else would rather be left alone. They see something they’re excited about and think, quite reasonably, that everybody else should probably see it too.
With our ice creams finished and favourite umbrellas chosen, we made our way back to the train, where Mary and Grace slept most of the way home.
Two outings down, two to go.
To be continued. . .
Lovely. lol never take Cian to ikea!!
This is such a great tradition. Not only fun, but also good practice for kids. I’m sure it’s something they’ll always remember too.