After visiting relatives this weekend we endured a nightmare journey home, taking no less than 14 hours...We arrived at our front door shortly before midnight on Sunday. No roast dinner for us, only snacks in the car. No watching ‘Fake or Fortune’ with a glass of red whilst admiring Fiona Bruce and her increasingly futuristic wardrobe. ‘A’ roads and crazy diversions saw to that. It was a very, very, VERY long day. The children were bored to the point of playing ‘I spy’ on the motorway for the 159th time, which, when you’ve done cars, roads and central reservation (they did learn something I suppose), there’s not much to go at really.
Other games included making words out of number plate letters. It’s the kind of game that forces you to dig very deep into your personal vocabulary pot when you’re stuck behind the same car for 15 miles.
So, what to do? Well, we retold our childhood escapades to two very interested children, we mentally redecorated the dining room and fended off repeated requests for more household pets. We solved world poverty and brokered a peace deal, then sang Taylor Swift songs until we knew every single word, even the ‘talky’ bits.
As fun as it sounds, we were extremely glad to get home, not least to climb into our very own beds! Bliss. You don’t quite realise how much you want to be in that bed until your head hits the pillow and bam, you are immovable!
But much more than wanting to get into my own bed, I was looking forward to getting the children into their pyjamas and tucking them in after their lengthy stint as ‘car prisoners’. They had been eulogising about their comfy beds for the last 100 miles or so. If only I could have caught them on camera, a glowing, first class review of Little Lucy Willow beds - by their occupants no less!
That night, as always, I pulled their bedspreads over their tired little bodies and kissed their sleepy heads goodnight and can honestly say I have never seen them so happy in their slumber!
So for those whose children don’t sleep too well, I can recommend a jaunt in the car that might just do the trick. It only takes about 14 hours...