The First Day of the School Holidays

It is first day of the winter holidays. It used to be the August school holidays. We’d all be prepared and parents and grandparents planned out the family holiday visits to cousins places.
Nowdays it’s more like a rude awakening for working parents on a Thursday afternoon that school finishes early the next day and the kiddies are home alone, with you, for the next two weeks. In rain and sub zero temperatures.

It’s 8am, Sunday, and thank goodness for Google, copy off random pages from the road safety and coast guard activity books. “Oh it’s like little school at home guys,” By lunchtime, we’ve had to go out back and finish dismantling a fence ready for builders this week, so for safety sake, the three kiddies get to pile on ski suits and come play over on the back paddock where we can see them. Half an hour later, three tearful kiddies are peeling off freezing drenched clothes, and I’m busy removing boxthorn prickles from hands. I never realised just how much ski gear we have until it is dragged from one end of the hall to the other.
Mental note to self – why don’t the kids wear this gear to school, it’s actually warm!

Lunch, then thank goodness for google, Teo Reo Maori puzzles for school kids and how to draw a pony printed off, followed by colour in your solar system, “Solar System mobile making? ” ” No, not today maybe tomorrow eh, who the heck printed that off” By 9pm at night, dinner was a disaster, apparently smoked fish pie isn’t everyone’s favourite and no we don’t have white bread only grainy, so its hunkering down watching the rhubarb and apple sponge pudding cook that they have just made themselves from rhubarb they picked themselves. Served with custard they had turns stirring. Then bed at 10pm.

Fourteen hours later, it’s only the first day over. I’d say I’ll blog a diary all holidays but I know better than to commit like that. God Bless School teachers.
PS, someone had better remember to ring the builder in the morning, to put it off for another week.