The Longest Summer Days

This is not what my summer holidays are like (photo: Supagroova)

When people talked about long summer days, I always had the impression that it was a positive thing.   Clearly I wasn’t talking to many parents on the topic. Summer days are not just described as long by parents because the sun is in the sky a lot longer but because you are with your child (or, gold help you, children) AAALLLLLLL day.  For a lot of us, that’s a new and surprisingly excruciating experience.  No playgroup, no childcare.  And then there is all the extra effort of stopping your child breaking everything and discovering a whole new set of dangers in another house.  There is no small amount of additional time and energy spent monitoring the movements of a child intent on discovering every corner and no-go zone of the your chosen holiday accommodation. The ornaments, so many sodding ornaments…  I’m hoping for a minimalism come-back to sweep the rental properties industry, without the sharp corners.

A couple we know who have a live-in nanny remarked to us recently that a holiday without a nanny is not a holiday.  We dismissed it as the smug naivety of the better-off.  Now I’m pretty sure that I could find the determination to downgrade my accommodation standards to allow for a nanny budget.  I’m not sure how many caravans have a nanny room (next to the kitchen, naturally, where all live-in-nanny rooms go) but it’s worth investigating.

Both the Spaniard and I were so exhausted at the end of the day we could barely muster the energy to make dinner.  I barely managed to get to the downstairs fridge and back up again to fetch a beer.  Having made it downstairs, I contemplated staying there to drink the beer and sleep there more than once.  Several times a bowl of nuts seemed to me to be a perfectly suitable substitute for a cooked meal.

I didn’t realise how much of a toll the whole carrying baby, umbrella, buckets and assorted equipment across sand and up and down beach steps, swinging baby through water, helping baby walk, stopping baby falling off yacht, jetty, stairs, etc was taking until I woke up on the morning of the second day to find my calf muscles so tight I could barely walk.  I initially convinced myself that looking after a single, small child couldn’t be the reason for the muscle strain.  Impossible.  That would make me disgracefully feeble and unfit.  There must have been a one-off muscle straining action at fault.  But then I woke up feeling the same way for the next consecutive five days, accompanied by pains and aches in my back and pretty much every other part of my body. The Shame.

Next year there will be two babies. I think I may skip summer.

photo credit: Supagroova

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