The First Week of Summer Holidays (A Diary)

Day one: fine.

Day two: fine. Slightly more activity required than anticipated, but fine.

Day three: I understood, with sudden clarity, why the phrase summer holidays is considered a stressor by every parent I have ever spoken to, and also why nobody explains this to you in advance, because there is no way to explain it that would be believed.

It's not the children. The children are wonderful. It's the management of the children — the specific, relentless cognitive load of keeping them occupied, fed, safe, moderately stimulated, and not in a crisis of boredom — from the moment they wake up until the moment they're asleep, every day, for six weeks, without the structural scaffolding of school to do most of the work.

I have a spreadsheet. I'm not proud of it but I have it. It has the weeks across the top and activities down the side and there are colour-coded blocks representing who is going where with whom. He looked at it and said it was thorough.

That spreadsheet represents approximately four hours of invisible cognitive labour that happened before any of the activities themselves.

By Friday of week one, I had already planned weeks two through four.

This is the summer holiday invisible load: not the things you do, but the things you have to think about before you can do them, multiplied by six weeks, multiplied by everyone in the house.

Day seven: we went to the beach. It was genuinely lovely. I was only half-narrating the afternoon.