Recently, we took the girls on holiday.

I had thought we would venture abroad; a pleasant 3 or 4 hour flight, a short transfer, a family-friendly hotel with a kid’s club and sunshine.  Lots of sunshine.  We’d get a dose of Vitamin D and return home relaxed and tanned. 

Of course we could be one of those fabulous families who travel somewhere hot and exotic.  Mini-Me and her Daddy would frolick in the pool while Princess and I would lounge under a huge parasol, watching them.

   Princess would sleep in her buggy while we enjoyed Meditteranean cuisine  and sipped warm grape-juice every evening in a different sea-front restaurant, while Mini-Me would love the novelty of staying up late with us. We’d all be so relaxed and happy that there would be no tantrums and we would simply have some amazing, sunfilled family time.

 Obviously.

And then we had a few weeks of rare, lovely, summery weather at home and my perspective on what our family holiday abroad would be, changed slightly.

Or rather…it changed dramatically!
The reality of a foreign holiday for my little bundle of Crazy-frogs would be this:

❤We’d have two cranky weins by the time we’d even get to the nearest airport.  Even the thought of the security queues and trying to entertain/restrain the baby on a flight is enough to make me want gin.  She’s a wriggler.  She would not be a happy bunny.

❤There’s no way in hell that I’d manage to pack into limited suitcase space. Princess alone fills the boot of the car for an overnight in Granny’s.  And I do pack bare minimum.  Before kids, The Him and I often traveled with just hand luggage. 

Then, not a bother.  

Now, not a hope!

❤The Kids’ Club would need to have better security than the White House, with 18 foot electrified walls and “eye-dentification” scanners for access, before The Him would let the girls out of his sight for 2 minutes.  So that would be a no go.

❤Swimming pool fun would be wonderful….Until we tried to get her OUT of the pool.  She gets completely knackered if she goes swimming, so I can’t imagine how shattered she would be if she spent much of the day in a pool. 

Trying to extract her from said pool, would look like a scene from The Exorcism of Emily Rose. We’d be videod by a Sanctimommy and end up on Youtube or terriblehorribleparents.com.

❤Our two Darlings are in bed every night by 7.30pm.  They get grumpy very quickly when they pass their sleep.  Add this to the post-pool exhaustion… Nightmare.  

❤I’d spend the whole time clattering them both in factor 6000 to make sure they didn’t burn.  Princess would end up a slimy little monster and her wriggling would be extra effective with the added slipperiness. 

❤I’d pretty much end up doing all the things Mummies do at home, just in sticky heat with a grumpy family.

So we opted for a Staycation and headed to Dublin for 4 days instead.

I know, I know…

I can hear some of the comments already.

“We go on holidays with the kids all the time.”

“Don’t be silly, youd have a blast!”

“We’ve trecked the Lake District with the 5 of them.  I carried the twins in a sling.”

Well, Good for you.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t holiday abroad with the kids.  I’m saying We don’t fancy it.  Not just yet.

We packed up my exceptionally large boot (seiously… hand luggage my arse!), stocked up on Disney stories and music, and off we went.

We stayed in Castleknock Hotel and Country Club, visited Tayto Park, went into the City Centre to Grafton Street to soak up some culture. (By this I obviously mean The Disney Shop and Brown Thomas.), and finished up with a trip to the zoo.

 (I’ll be posting reviews of the hotel and Tayto park tonight.)

We had a lovely time.  Yes.  Quite lovely. 

It was very relaxing. 

Mini-Me in particular had a wonderful time, but to be honest, the most wonderful thing about it was having her Daddy to herself for 4 whole days.  

As it turns out, I made the right decision for us.

The journey to Dublin was long enough.  The “Are we there yet?” started in Strabane. When we reached the hotel, both of us agreed that having to start an airport journey now, would be horrible.

We realised at the same moment in Tayto Park, that we are most likely THE Hangriest Family in the WORLD.  Seriously.  When you get to the point of hunger where you want to physically hurt the next person who walks in front of you, bumps into you, looks at you etc… it’s time to eat. And we ALL tend to reach that point at exactly the same time. Dangerous.

The weather was fab. Sunny, warm and just perfect for us.  The Him even got a start on the farmer’s tan and Mini-Me got more freckles.  But while the heat was lovely, it was another affirmation to us that any hotter would have been a pain in the posterier. Mini-Me and Princess don’t like it.  They get narky and squirmy and don’t quite know wha0ts wrong with them. 

You know when you’re abroad and you see those families at 10pm with Child snuggled up on top of Daddy, baby sleeping soundly in the pram and Mammy sipping on a glass of warm wine?

 Yeah.

 That shit wouldn’t happen with us.

Our Child was begging for bed by 8pm. In fairness to her, she was exhausted. We got as far as main course each evening before she flicked that little switch that propels her from “tolerable” to “terrifying”. On night 2, the waiter didn’t even ask if we wanted the dessert menu. He was a quick learner.

Baby was the same.

So in reality, it was lights off by 8.30pm.  Dark room. No telly. No warm wine on a balcony. The habits they have at home that I thank God for each night, do not transfer to a family room.  

The Him was sent out for a run each night. I supped grapejuice sitting on towels on the bathroom floor reading the musings of the very funniful Marian Keyes.

Glamorous? No.  

Worth it? Yes. 

We had a lot of fun.  The parks were fantastic. Mini-Me was in Heaven. We had some much needed family time with Daddy and Mammy got a new handbag. (Happiness is…) 😂😂

And when we got home on Thursday, we still had a few days to relax and have fun before Daddy went back to work.

So yes. Of course a sun holiday would be lovely. But it’d only be lovely for Me and Him. On our own. Alone. Where we could lie in the sun all day, worrying ONLY about our own skin, and actually get as far as dessert at dinner! 

 For now, until they’re a little older anyway, we’ll holiday where suits us. And Dorothy had a point… There’s no place like home. 👠👠

I am Staycation Mum. 😙

Follow my S-mumblings on 

Facebook @secretsofsmum  

Twitter maria.Rushe 

Instagram  the.s.mum 

Today, I got lost.
😡
I never get lost.
  I have a weird built-in homing device that usually means I can sit ANYWHERE and know which direction points to my house. 
I blame/thank my Dad for this weird Homing Pigeon freakishness, and my good sense of direction is often a bone of contention with The Him.
(The Him’s sense of direction is shit. He can’t find his way out of Ikea, but he CAN however apparently move mountains as he’s decided that Mt. Errigal is no longer where it has always been since he moved here. He has yet to realise that he’s wrong, but that’s another story.) 😂

I digress.

So, today, I got lost… 45 minutes from our house. (The Him will love this.) 👤

I was going to meet Mini-Me on her school tour and having been at the Forest Park MANY TIMES as a child, I knew where to go.
Or so I thought.

My first “Silly Mummy” moment was to follow the bus in front of me, ASSUMING that it was our kids. 😐
(Yes…Ass out of U and Me…. I know, I know…)
I followed the buses to the Friary and only realised that I was in the wrong place when there were no other cars and a group of teenagers stepped off the bus. 😐

From the arse of my memory, I got a flash of a big wooden entrance that I should have looked for, rather than being a silly bitch and following a random bus.  I headed back towards the main road, cursing my Silly-Mumminess and thanking the Monks in the Friary, that no one EVER had to know…

Smug that I would not have to look like a Baby-brained-Bimbo-Mummy to all the other My-shit-is-in-control Mummies at the park, I looked in my rear view mirror.

AND realised that the car behind me had been FOLLOWING ME!

So much for my secret.

Another bewildered looking Lovely Mummy was waving frantically at me.  I stopped.  She’d followed me as she recognised my car. (And because I OBVIOUSLY do a great job at SEEMING like I’ve got my shit together…😂)
So I did what any Perfectly cool 35 year old does when they’re in a spot of bother.
I rang my Daddy. ❤

He tutted at me for being so silly and passing the entrance that I SHOULD have seen on my right and hung up.
He is NEVER WRONG, so, armed with the confidence of my Daddy KNOWING EVERYTHING, off we proceeded… THE WRONG WAY.   We drove back into the town, realised we were wrong and turned again.
Because guess what?
Daddy was WRONG.  (Which he later admitted so it doesn’t count.) 😂😂

(Mammies are amazing by the way… we were communicating perfectly with flashing lights and the odd horn toot. 👭
LEGENDS. 👏👏👏)

We drove back to where we had originally realised we were lost and stopped again.
So Other Lost Lovely Mummy did the sensible thing; she pulled out her iPhone and google mapped us.
Duh…
Now, because Google maps was completely hammered drunk, he sent us up a laneway that we both KNEW was going the wrong way.  (I may have been a bit lost, but I knew when I was in danger of ending up crossing a border into somewhere unknown and terrifying; like Cavan. 😈)

So I pulled in (again) and flashed at Other Lost Lovely Mummy to stop.
And stop she did. 
But then as she reversed, her car ended up with a wheel in the ditch.  I kid you not… 🙆

So there we were, Two Lovely Mummies, (Well, SHE was lovely.  I  actually looked like a skank who had been battered through a hedge and spat out.  Tracksuit, no muck-up and baseball cap.  MINGER.), LOST with one car stuck in the hedge.  😢😢

The Farmer in me saved the day.  👍 Dad not only instilled a (usually) fabulous sense of direction in me, he taught me how to reverse like a stunt driver.  When you grow up driving tractors, cars are easy. 
So with direction and encouragement from Other Lost Lovely Mummy and some good old fashioned STUBBORNESS, I got her car out of the hedge and back onto the road to nowhere.

We headed back towards civilization, flagged down a car, got directed in the opposite direction to what Daddy had suggested and found the big wooden gate about 500metres down the feckin road.

We got there.
About 45 minutes late, but still.
Two cars, two Lost Lovely Mammies got there, just in time to head off into the woods with our kiddies and to have (another!) fantastic adventure.

The Him did quite a bit of snaughling and head-shaking at me when I told him my not-even-in-need-of-exaggeration story.

So I’ve just told him to piss off, that he should be glad I made it home at all and I have opened a bottle of prosecco to celeb
rate the fact that I survived.

Bottoms up Bitcheepooooos.
And cheers to other Lost Lovely Mummy xxx 🍷🍷

S-Mum