Time off after kids

When you leave the house for some time off without your young kids – ensuring there is another compos mentis adult around first, of course – it can be difficult to switch off the instincts. Someone struggles with their coat next to you: leave them to it! People drop umbrellas: they can pick them up themselves! You don’t have to be a twit about it and if help is obviously needed and can be given, it should be offered. But none of these other humans are entirely reliant on you and isn’t that marvellous?

Everyone thinks – and you think yourself – that what you will want to do as soon as you have time off after kids are the big things: shopping, manicure, ski trip, etc but actually what you crave is down time.

Sitting in a cafe, eating without interruption, staring into space or reading a book in bed. It is the little moments that matter more than a night in a club. Anyway, when you have done newborn duty pulling an all-nighter seems less hardcore. Try 100 nights of sleep broken into two-hour intervals. Being a sleep-lover, I am still not sure how I made it through…

Best thing has to be though, after a couple of hours away, you feel like you have been away a bit too long. (Really you have felt this since about 10 minutes after you left, but you have reached a point of being unable to ignore it.) Then you get back home, keen to see the little faces again. Walk in the door and…

…they didn’t even realise you had gone.