Summer holiday unwritten " laws."

[malificent7]

Tongue in cheek.

There shall be a huge heatwave the last week of school when the kids are too hot to do anything then without fail rain on the 1st day of holidayd followed by a cold spell. Intermittent bad weather for 6 weeks for all those taking a staycation.

The road works start the 1st week of school holidays...great for school run mums; shit for commuters.

Wasps and seagulls will congregate on the beach.

Please add to the list.

9am on the first day of the holiday they'll be bored.

Appetites increase ten fold and they're starving for lunch by 10:30am despite snacking all morning.

Clarks will stock every pair of shoes except the ones in your child's size or the style they want.

The plimsoll size you need will be the one every shop doesn't have.

Something will be lost, need replacing or won't fit on the first school morning back.

Your 9 DD has her best friend over, you need to run some errands so have to take them with you. They moan they don’t want to go.

You have to buy a coir door mat so you go to Carpetland. They have so much fun playing hide and seek among the rolls of carpet, in an empty shop, they spend the rest of the week begging to go back.

Its not all bad!

Your youngest will arrive home on the last day of term (Friday) and proceed projectile vomit all over the living room and be ill with a 39.3 temp that is still there today. Oh and she will also develop painful mouth ulcers on the Monday and the GP will still keep saying "Just use Calpol and wait and see if she needs antibitics".

Your child will arrive home from school on the last day of term without his glasses and waterproof coat. You will have to either fork out for new ones or hope he can see well enough to dodge raindrops till he goes back in September.

@DessicatedWithering did your kids find that pigeon too?!
😂

QVC will have their second Christmas weekend special by the weekend. Just so grandma can get ready for the winter.

Don't forget the moldy clementine which you now realise is the source of that smell in the hall.

You will excitedly purchase lovely stationary for your son who starts at secondary school in September. You purchase a nice Parker pen. New uniform. New PE kit including nice towel for swimming. New shoes. New glasses. 🥳

first week in he loses the lot and never gets any of them back as obviously you don’t rummage through lost property in year 7 as NO mother does this.

he’s now 28 and this still irks me.

Little bit off topic, but I accidentally left my last work lunch leftovers in my lunchbox and put it away in the utility room. I didnt realise until I went back to work 14 months later.

Your DD, who hated back to school shopping last year and had to be dragged out to do at it the last minute (and then complained that it was rushed and she wanted more time to choose) will start banging on about pencil cases and stupid fidget pens the moment she breaks up. In a year when you have bugger all money and were hoping to fob her off with her existing tat and shoes (which also barely engaged in choosing last year) and buy new boots at half term instead.

I wouldn’t mind, but she WAKES ME UP to witter on about pens. You’d think it could wait a couple of hours, wouldn't you? You know, this pen that she doesn’t need for almost TWO MONTHS!

Oh, and the longest school holiday you have ever known, with the best weather you have ever known will occur in the year in which you have the least money you have ever had. Your cousin will announce they are off camping to the South of France for three weeks if you fancy it, as her holidays allow that this year and you will have to sell your camper if you want to so much as go to the cinema.

You carefully schedule the 6 weeks holidays with a cover of annual leave, holiday clubs, amazing friends and your mum who'd offered to have them for a week.
On the Sunday of said week you pack 2 children and 75443 changes of clothes to drive the 100 miles to 'dear' mother. On arrival she's pissed in bed. You have a massive row, know there's no way you'll leave the kids, put them back in the car and the 3 of you cry all the way home.
She's dead now (alcoholic) and they are 24 and 25 but I'm still bitter.

@DessicatedWithering 😂😂😂

We are Scotland so half way through the holidays. Went through DSs school stuff at the weekend. Needed it of the worktop.

Found the bit about Easter Holidays, "went to buy food for his pet fish and had McDs", not a flipping mention of being in France or anything we he did the second week of the holidays (cinema & swimming)

Sainsburys will rearrange every item in the shop on the last day of term, so you have to search for everything when you are in the most hurry or have children with you.

You have two bags of clothes, one contains last years outgrown uniform to take to the local uniform bank, and one contains new uniform items for back to school. Your DH in an effort to be helpful takes the wrong bag to the uniform bank… 🤦‍♀️

On Friday your Precious 4th Born will come home from school feeling a bit off colour. You will, over the weekend realise this is Covid19. By Monday P4thB will be better, you however will also have Covid and feel a bit grotty. DH and adult DS will also have it, and be lying around, dying a thousand deaths.

Adult DD1 who was only home for the weekend will also test positive. She will refuse to go back to her flat, so not to infect her boyfriend, and is now trying to work from (your) home, amongst the sick and hyperactive.

Adult DD2 who was away for the weekend, now refuses to come home as she starts a (very important) job next week and is now camped out at the home of a deceased relative, with no wifi.
Happy holidays.

Your ex husband will make various mad cap arrangements to cover his part of the holidays, which somehow involve your parents, having gone to them over your head. These plans will change continually and will inexplicably then involve you at various times you hadn’t in any way expected.

Same exh will then keep trying to turn up at your house to see the children during your half of the holidays.

Everybody will be ill at the worst possible time.

Teachers: you will have a fantastic Friday to Sunday when you break up, then on the Monday of ther first week will start the process of fretting away the rest of the holiday, entirely ruining it for yourself.

Our kids had a rule that on day one of holidays, one of them would wake up with a very infectious disease. One the last day of the incubation period, but not before, another child would get it (rinse and repeat).

It was a bit like musical chairs, or pass the parcel; with a bit of luck, the last one to catch it would still be infectious on the first day of the next term. so got a longer holiday.

You ambitiously set out "fun" day trips full of family bonding opportunities for time you've taken off. Day 1 you rush about packing lunches and making plan "b" because it turns out the amusement park is closed, trains are delayed/cancelled, everybody's too hot and dc are bickering with each other non-stop.
You long for the return to work.

We once had a holiday for which DS's highlight was finding a dead crow

This year you will be organised and order the school uniform 2 sizes bigger in plenty of time. You will place the order, collect the order and have it ready for the new term. You slip a bit and will only get it out to sew labels in the night before school goes back. At which point you will discover they have given you the correct size and items - but for the wrong bastard school. You will seriously contemplate ringing the other school up to see if you can get your kid in there rather than have to take back the uniform!

Your children will proudly return home with a pile of artwork in really inconvenient and unframeable sizes/formats (huge cardboard African shield...? Mixed media pasta sculpture?) which will sit on the side in the kitchen waiting for you to screw up your courage to bin the lot. It gets to the last week of the holidays and you are still too cowardly so you guiltily shove it on top of the books at the top of a bookcase only to discover there's already a wodge of artwork up there from the last two years that you couldn't find and assumed you'd binned.

Your greenhouse is smashed because the DCs + their mates have played cricket in your back garden.

You start the holidays by thinking picnics are fun, by week 4 you are totally fed up of picnics and karting them around and emptying thermos flasks on a daily basis. You can no longer stomach an over heated squashed sarnie and you resort to the x box as entertainment ( if you have managed to last that long)

On the flip side of the “what I did in the holidays” essay, I still remember that at age 7 I wrote a long story outlining lots of things we’d done. Was really proud of it. At the end I happened to comment that I’d had a nose bleed. The teacher’s only comment on the essay was “oh dear!” to the nose bleed aspect. Felt so sorry I’d mentioned it as it’d worked so hard on my essay and would have appreciated a “good work” or “well done”!