Half Term with Teenagers - Challenge Accepted

School holidays have become a completely different experience now my kids are a teenager and pre-teen.

No more pushing swings and roundabouts, or soft play.

Now, working out what to do in the holidays is a whole new thing, half the time they just want to be on their own and don't want to spend time with us boring adults, and then they emerge from their rooms saying 'so what are we doing today?' all expectant and child like again.

This in-between child and adult time is a difficult time, not just in the holidays but generally as they find themselves and grown into little adults taking their child personalities and becoming something new.

The first few days of this half term were very quiet, my eleven year old was poorly with the lurgy that had affected most of her class the week before. She had managed to resist it for the majority of that time but just as the holiday was about to begin she got it. Bless her.

Fortunately, I hadn't planned anything for the first half of the week anyway.

The plan for the second half of the week was to go away, only and hour or so down the motorway, but away for a couple of nights, with a friend and her two similar aged boys.

So it's us, verses four teenagers, or rather two teenagers and two nearly teenagers.

The four of them have known each other since birth and think of each other as family, so there are no holes barred. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

My girls with my friend and her boys in front of Grafham Water

We went to a place called Grafham in Cambridgeshire, which is a fifteen minute walk across country to Grafham Water which is a beautiful lake.

We went for two nights and one whole day. On the whole day we walked to the lake in the morning and went to Cambridge in the afternoon.

I was hoping to have a mooch through some museums and look at the beautiful architecture of the city. I had, of course, forgotten that I was travelling with four teenagers, all of whom wanted to to do slightly different things. One wanted to shop for clothes another wanted to go to Forbidden Planet, another wanted to go to the museum....you get the picture, a little bit fraught.

In the end we did manage to see some of Christ Church College, and we did shop for clothes and go to Forbidden Plant (for the non-geeks amongst you, it is a shop for geeks with lots of geeky stuff in it).

So there was some reluctant compromise - unsurprisingly, we didn't manage to get to any of the wonderful museums in Cambridge (next time when I am sans kids, I think).

Part of Christ Church College Cambridge

So what have I learnt?

• All families are different and have different approaches to looking after their kids. 

• Lots of teenagers/pre-teens are hard to please as a group. 

• With negotiation and sticking to your guns you can get some compromise out of them, but you need to be steely.
• They are are always hungry and can eat constantly (I knew this already, but when you are away from home it can get really expensive).
•  I am proud of my kids, and their behaviour (on the whole).
• Being confined in a fairly small Airbnb place with four teenagers, probably wasn't the wisest decision when there aren't enough seats for all of us in the communal area.
• Getting them outside and walking in the countryside was the best thing we could have done.

So what would I do differently next time? Possibly get a bigger space to stay in, with more privacy for them, and definitely do more country walks and less going into the city.

So that was my half term, how was yours?

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