holiday

Easter holidays. Pretty much done and they have had their moments (like nearly the entirety of Thursday and Friday) but also loads of good. This was the first school holiday with two girls at home. If I just put here that C likes quiet and E likes loud and very physical, that may go some way to enlightening anyone interested as to how time at home can go for us. Especially when S is home, too. Loud, and also can be very focused on something, which is amazing from my adult perspective, but infuriating for siblings who think that even though she can play with something for hours on end and not break it or bust it or eat it or bin it or ruin it in any conceivable way, the fact that she might have done that two years ago is still apparently a strong factor in their brains or may it’s just the infuriating THAT’S MINE that maybe I’ll have on my gravestone.

Here’s some of what happened for us over these holidays.

We recovered. Good Friday I realised was the first morning in weeks and weeks that we didn’t have to be somewhere and we were all well. Girls needed a rest. I needed a rest. I made hot cross buns for the first time in years only I didn’t do great crosses so I scored the raised eight-year-old eyebrows of doubt as to their validity. Fair. I was really frustrated that, being a very crafty person who really likes making things and who has a whole heap of Easter crafts saved on Instagram and Pinterest, nothing of the sort happened. As I said, girls were wrecked. The place was an utter disaster as I’d been working so much (I did NO work over the Easter weekend though) so I did what I could to make that less … you know. The closest we got to craft was the girls playing with rainbow clay for a bit. I was sad, but also mindful for next year. I have plans.

Thanks to Bluey, the Easter Bunny did a bit of a hunt with clues for the girls. The most talked about bit was that he left socks in their Easter baskets!!! So the next clue was where their socks go!! And it was a fridge magnet and he had hidden some Easter eggs in magnet houses on the fridge!!! And so on. Unfortunately, there were not enough clues for E so she was moaning about that all morning. We actually made it to church on Easter Sunday, also for the first time in a long time. This was huge for me, and it made such a difference to my inner being. There were so many kids in the children’s area I didn’t even count but at least 30.

This was a holiday of park visits. We went to parks, as many parks as possible. On Easter Monday, we went to one which is a bit of a walk away but has a bus just outside to take us home. This park is big and lovely and the big open spaces and tall trees always do my soul some good. At one point, C asked me to pretend to be a fox and she was a rabbit, and it ended up with me chasing all my three girls plus another who looked she could have been my child. It turned into me being Mr Todd and they were all little bunnies and that was then the game for the holidays. Throughout the holidays, we also kept running into E’s best friend. Both girls have younger siblings still at the same daycare and we would all either collide at drop-off and then sometimes go to a park together, or pass each other on the way home… and go to the same park together. Sometimes they would have their dogs which would have C over the moon.

E’s big request for the holidays was to go to the hose park with this friend, so we actually coordinated a double family trip (although Glenn was working. Sigh). Ferries were caught. The hose park – a play area outside GoMA with a giant hose sprawled around it on which my kids will play for hours and hours and hours – was played in and new friends were made and ice creams were screamed about and consumed and then we went to the pink park – the playground in South Bank with pink slides – for more playing there before coming home in the middle of a stupidly hot day. Girls slept well that night.

This was the holiday of the flu stab. I mean flu shot. My plan had been to take E and C on the Wednesday in the first week, slather C in the numbing gel, get them both their stabs and then on Friday, S and I would get ours done and Glenn would get his as and when he could. Great plan, except C has been working up to this for two years. Two years of anxiety over the pain that the previous two flu shots caused her. She is, shall I say, rather sensitive, but also super interested so every nurse and pharmacist and phlebotomist trying all the tricks just fails as she will pay enough attention to answer their distracting questions but still keep a very close eye on the stab site. She screamed so much while E was having hers done that the pharmacist and I bailed. C tried again later with Glenn and closer but still no, so I forked out for the new nasal spray for her and four of us had our shots on the Friday. Yay for free flu vaccines!

This was the first holiday of a holiday activity. The dance school where ballet and acro happen holds holiday workshops and C and E both wanted to do the Disney princess one. Drop off 8.30-9, pickup about 3.15, and I could actually get to do some work without E suddenly at my side to tell me, “Mummy it’s ten dot dot four six. It’s ten dot dot forty-six!” Or being asked on repeat for colouring in pages or to take photos of drawings or loom bands or whose turn it is on the iPad and can we play a game on the iPad. Goodness. I love it when they do acro in the hallway – C can climb up to the ceiling – but the screaming when someone walks underneath without announcing it, and the arguing over whether a move should be classed as a bunny hop or an L-stand or a handstand, not to mention all the thuds of young people landing nearby – it gets a bit much. We all really appreciated that dance workshop.

Since then, though, it’s just been four days of frustration and fighting. Mostly. We have a rental inspection on Tuesday and so I am busy chucking stuff and getting frustrated that, not having done well in being a good example for keeping the place nice nor installing any form of respect for our home or just don’t just drop your used bandaid on the floor, girls are trying to run and hide at most mentions of making the place look nice. Or even just less bad. I am anticipating two days of intense stress followed by about the same of ooh isn’t this nice and clear and … ahhhhh. Wish me luck.

We did a spring break. A mini vacation. A very brief respite from our everyday. Glenn had some bonus time off booked. I took a day off work and we – well, I want to say skipped down to the Gold Coast but that does not at all match with the length of the trip there or back thanks to no trains on the Gold Coast line for, as it turns out, about a month which encompasses the whole school holidays including the long weekend WHAT ARE THEY THINKING but anyway. It was an impromptu booking a week beforehand, so only a week of S thinking we were going that day to the beach where she would build sandcastles and splash in the water. That was a long week.

In writing this post, I have tried writing out a blow-by-blow and it just goes on and on and for someone who’s not actually in our family why would you read that? No. I’ll shorten it for you a tad. You’re welcome.

Day 1. Report card: B … B- … I mean, it was a tough day. Getting to the Gold Coast for us is usually about 90 minutes, maybe 2 hours if connections don’t quite go our way and we are staying at the more southern end. But instead of a zippy train, train, tram, we had to do train, train, rail bus, rail bus that had to go on the highway with all the traffic that doesn’t know how to merge apparently and my goodness me that took a long time, tram. Girls were fantastic, despite the 5 hour trip. We had snacks and did things like look for car and truck colours and there were no screens except to look on the map.

Day 1 had an anxious C whose anxious came out in grumpy contrariness. I was giving myself an A+ for handling it until I snapped in the late afternoon after walking with her and S along the beach from Q1 to near our hotel (about a kilometre) where both girls wanted to walk in the water and both girls got entirely soaked and sandy and I had a hoarse voice from calling to C to not be so far out and then we were talking about dinner and going to a restaurant for dinner as we had discussed as a whole family already and E had told that to her favourite daycare teacher as the thing she was actually most looking forward to but C started kicking off about not wanting to go anywhere from the hotel once we were back. I snapped.

As it turned out, we did not go out to dinner.

Glenn had a fairly stressful Day 1, also, with children wanting to sit on him for pretty much the entire trip and then worrying about girls eating – not that I don’t worry about this, too, thank you, but I have also learned through much experience that food is lower on their list than all sorts of other things. If they’re playing, they will hardly eat. If they’re tired, small serves. If they have had a long trip and they know the beach is RIGHT THERE then they will eat the most minimal amount of food so they can be done with it and go to the beach. Then he also had the dinner brain in and so he was the one who went off to find takeaway for us to have in our hotel room on the balcony table that we brought inside and trying to serve it so we didn’t have noodles going everywhere and making sure girls had relatively fair serves of noodles and protein and veg so there weren’t fights over who had more broccoli and S please please please use a wipe not the bed to clean up your sauce.

To top it all off, girls were so exhausted that all three of them declared at 6pm – S I X P M – that they were tired and wanted to go to bed. S was asleep on her tummy right at the edge of her bed by 7 or so. C and E … not even close. So not even close that I don’t even know when it was they each fell asleep because I was actually curled up crying in our bed, overwhelmed by washed out hopes and the frustration of girls who can’t sleep after a big day. Bonus was S needed me during the night and so I ended up sleeping in her bed with her which would have been lovely but for all the wet sand that she had brought in with her when we came in after the beach.

But then it was dawn and I am giving Day 2 an A. Dawn. Whole family photo in matching family Bluey pyjamas. Breakfast on the balcony, marvelling at how high we are. Visit to the hotel pool. Time in the very chilly water and photos and girls running on the grass and delighting in togs and beauty and water.

And then there was the beach. The beach for hours. Sparkling waves. E terrified of the water after thinking the moving sand the day before was quicksand but then, bucket refill after bucket refill, getting more and more confident, confident enough to jump in the waves at the very edge a little bit, filling the air with screamsqueals of laughter. A delighted S running to and fro on the sand, making serious work of building sandcastle after sandcastle. Girls screaming with joy.

C jumping to be in the water with me, and then we were in the water together and something shifted for us. Waist-deep in the water, jumping with the breaking waves, turning side-on to brace ourselves against the bigger waves, being in sparkling refreshing saltwater, being free, heart swelling.

Just holding my little girl who is approaching my shoulder height and remembering how little she used to be and realising how little she still is and feeling her trust in me and just holding her and realising that this – this experiencing the ocean with a child old enough to stand up and take this guidance – this was something I had wanted in my life. Not as something on my mental list for this particular holiday, but something as inner and longstanding as when I was a kid, I assumed I would have kids of my own and bring them to the beach and there are things you have to teach them and things you would do with them. Building sandcastles. Don’t flick a sandy towel. Jump at the water’s edge. Stay between the flags. Be in the water safely. Be a safe person for your child so they can cling to you in a range of emotions. Learn to – well, not quite bodysurf as I never really managed that, but be waist-deep in breaking waves and have waves breaking around you. I had not realised I had this need until we were in the midst of it and I had to savour the happy without succumbing to the happy tears and alarming all the other swimmers. It fixed C up, too, and she would have spent the entire day in there if I had let her.

But sun and hangry were beginning to overcome so we removed ourselves from this wonderful place and had our fancy (enough) restaurant meal for lunch before ice creams and starting the long but thankfully not nearly as long as the day before trip home. S was very much not happy with us for making home our real home and not our holiday house home so I copped it with her whole body frustration but when she had felt her feelings it got less bad. And then… then we were home. Home in time for Glenn to whip up a quick and relatively nutritious dinner to feed girls who were exhausted but, you know, still couldn’t sleep at a normal time but anyway. Home. Fed. Asleep eventually, with brains full of new experiences and new senses and new accomplishments and sand and water and salt and shells and sun and crashing waves and swimming pools and views to the mountains and the ocean. Such a break.

The Stuff of Our Life

Easter Holidays 2026

Beach Break