By I have just returned from a week in Bali, where my brother got married. Bali is wonderful. It’s an island of white beaches and sapphire seas, infinity pools and fire pits. It is nothing less than heaven on Earth. And I saw none of it, because I’ve got kids.
Oh, sure, the rest of the wedding party caught loads of that stuff, but most of my days were spent trapped in the living room of an Airbnb making sure that my one-year-old didn’t choke on any of the Lego bricks that my three-year-old kept hurling into the air as a sort of dangerously makeshift confetti.
But the trip wasn’t a total bust. This was my first long-haul travel experience as a father, which means I am now a world expert in the bullshit of going abroad with kids. Here are the ten thoughts that all parents have had at one point or another on holiday.
1 “There should be family-only flights”
Whenever a video of a distressed child on a plane goes viral, people always call on airlines to introduce adult-only flights, for people eager to ponder the godless abomination of human flight in peace. I say let’s go one step further. Let’s have family-only flights too. These flights would be expressly designed for parents like me: there’d be no seats, wipe-clean flooring, a big screen showing Madagascar 3 and an equal ratio of Fruit Shoots and hard alcohol on tap. It’d be hellish and noisy, like an 18-hour soft play session, but at least I wouldn’t have to put up with any sniffy twats tutting every time my kid coughs.
2. "I wish we were staying somewhere else"
Here is the eternal going away with kids conundrum. If you stay in a hotel you're all trapped in one room, so when your baby goes to sleep you're doomed to spend every evening watching a crap film TV on mute while silently pouring yourself hideously expensive minibar wine. But if you stay in an Airbnb, you have to use a typically terrible Airbnb kitchen. This means you'll have to cook dinner using a tiny saucepan, stir it with a kitchen knife and serve it family-style on a plastic lid you found in the bathroom. What's the best solution? Staying at home, obviously.
3. “Absolutely fuck swimming pools to death”
There is no relaxing by the pool with babies and toddlers. There is only sitting bolt upright by the pool, on full alert, blinking and twitching in case one of them slips over and falls in. That isn’t a pool. That’s a pulsating sculpture of your imminent heart attack.
4. “Hey, remember sleep?”
I cannot fucking wait for my children to fully grasp the notion of international timezones. But I won’t live that long, because there’s a seven-hour time difference between here and Bali, and both my kids have woken up at 1:30am for two consecutive nights, and my skin feels like melted plastic and I’m having heart palpitations and this sentence has taken me 18 minutes to write.
5. “No, self-consciously wacky island ex-pat, I don’t want to hear your life story”
Younger me would have embraced it. Younger me would have stopped at the market and listened to the garbled waffling of the ancient Dutchman dressed in bright pink who loves telling tourists how he emigrated to Indonesia back in 1947. Younger me would have smiled and nodded and taken it as yet another eccentric scrap in the patchwork quilt of life. Older me, though, was tired and hot and holding two children – one banging me on the head with a wooden tortoise, the other right in the middle of soiling himself – and he just about held it together long enough not to kick the bastard into the street for wasting his time. I vastly prefer older me.
6. “Why the hell would anyone go anywhere?”
A holiday with a kid isn’t a holiday. It’s exactly the same as being at home, except you’ve got less stuff, the air is full of things that want to kill you, and there’s a good chance you’ll have to spend twenty minutes forlornly trying to entertain a three-year-old while sitting on the toilet in the agonising midst of an apparently infinite bout of boiling hot diahorrea. I paid for this holiday.
7. “I will bequeath my entire estate to whoever invented iPlayer”
Thanks to a wifi snafu at home, I was only able to download three episodes of Waffle the Wonder Dog to an iPad before we left. But, boy, those three episodes got me through some dark times. Waffle the Wonder Dog now technically counts as the third parent to my children and I will kiss him with tongues in gratitude should we ever cross paths.
8. “I hate work”
And yet, despite all the effort that goes into having a holiday with kids, it still counts as relaxation. You might be worrying about the children, but you’re only worrying about the children. There are no deadlines or work appointments to contend with. All the mindless gnat-swatting of home life has gone away and you can focus your full attention on your family. It’s just you and them. That isn’t nothing.
9. “This is actually quite fun”
You know what? Seeing something new through your childrens’ eyes is the greatest thing in the world. Watching them get excited about all the weird little details that you’ve overlooked, like the stray dogs we’d see in the street, is the purest form of joy in the world. The little one took his first steps while we were away, too. I’d have missed that if I’d been at home working.
10. “Let’s go again next year”
Somewhere closer, obviously. Much closer. Center Parcs is like Bali, right?
