A Nice Thing Happens – I Must Write It Down

I am roundly ignoring the fact that today has been utterly miserable from its inception.  I am shovelling down fudge at an obscene rate of knots, and doing the whole ‘la, la, la, I can’t hear you,’ thing when my brain insists on reminding me of just how pooh ha the day has been so far.  Before I collapse on the study floor in an insulin coma I will regale you with news of a nice thing.  An exciting thing.  A thing that is going to happen to me quite soon and which I am pleased about.

We are going on holiday.

Oh yes!

You may recall, those long suffering readers amongst you, the angst of last year’s holiday plans.  We were on a budget, we were time pressured and Jason wanted five star accommodation with a swimming pool.  We found it courtesy of the amazing Tots to Travel website and the sterling help of the ever lovely, Home Office Mum.  We had a week of riotous living in France.  It was delicious, albeit tinged with sadness, due to the fact that we had just gone through hell thanks to the unexpected death of Jason’s mother.

This year we have decided to throw caution, and budget restrictions out of the window.  We are going to Canada.  We are going for a month in April.  We are going in term time.  Tilly will have SATS as soon as she gets back.  The school will hate us.  Nursery will not be pleased.  We do not care. 

We did this two years ago, and we had a wonderful time.  We desperately wanted to do it again, but there have always been issues.  This year is really our last chance.  I do not have a problem with taking primary school children out of school, but Tilly goes to high school next year, and particularly if we get her into the high school we want, which will be a bloody miracle, it seems churlish to then remove her for large periods of time.  It will not look good.  So it’s now or never.

We are going to Vancouver Island, which is where UE’s parents settled when they first emigrated when he was 3.  His dad is now dead, but the rest of his family are there, and it means that the girls can see their granny and their aunts and uncles and cousins, some of whom are shiny and new.  It will be good.  They are nice people.  They sometimes take the children away, and we get grown up time alone.  They include Oscar too, which is wonderful.

We are renting a house.  We like to do this because we are noisy, large, messy and unpredictable. Hotels are not an environment in which we thrive.  If we rent a house for a month it is better because we don’t pay tax on it, which we would if we had it for a week or two.  We are renting a big house because we  like to spread out.  We do not consider it a holiday if we are all perched on top of each other’s heads in a beige cube and wake up every time someone farts.  We are renting this house.  It will be too cold to use the pool, but I am sure we will be alright.  There are fourteen acres of garden to play in, and it is only a ten minute walk to the beach.  I worry about the piano. I hope it has a lock.  I note there are quite a lot of wipe clean floors. This is a good thing.  It is not particularly to my taste decoratively, but then the children would destroy The Hempel, so it will be fine.

We are flying in to Seattle.  It is fifteen hundred quid cheaper to fly to Seattle than to Vancouver.  It will only take marginally longer to get from Seattle to Victoria than from Vancouver to Victoria, both journeys involving cars and boats.  We have never been to Seattle before.  We are going to stay there for two days before we head out to the Island so we  can explore.  I am excited because I can drink insane amounts of coffee all in the name of tourism.  Any tips on cool things to do with kids in Seattle gratefully received.

So, it will be good.  We will relax. We will chill out.  We will eat shitloads.  We will read lots of books.  We will do cool things with the kids, who are already polishing their buckets and spades.  My goal this year is to see a raccoon.  I will not be denied.  It’s good to have plans.