Walking the Tightrope: School Trips
Sally Codman shares some witty thoughts and advice on the often contentious subject of school trips.
Parenthood is the most challenging, awesome, exhausting, rewarding task you'll ever undertake in life. Just as you think you've got one problem sorted, another comes along.
Most weeks I manage to keep my head above water, although I usually feel like one of the characters in Alice in Wonderland. You know the part - the one where they're living chess pieces and have to run faster and faster and someone says - "sometimes you have to run very fast just to stay in the same place."
The other week was spent preparing middle daughter for a school trip to Scotland. All parents of older children will be familiar with the drill. But if you have younger children and struggle to organise day trips - be warned! When you first hear about "the trip" enjoy the initial euphoria of realising you'll be one solider short of a battle for a few days. It will slowly dawn on you that the anticipated ceasefire has a price.
And I don't just mean the actual cash cost of the trip itself. The time and energy involved in equipping and shipping one child away for a few days is unbelievable.
Rule One - however desperate you are for a week's peace you don't make any rash promises when the hopeful child traveller first crashes through the door, waving a letter and shouting "You've got to let me go on this trip to the moon .....everyone else/all my friends are going and it's only £5,000"
The experienced parent starts by making only one promise - to "think about it"
First you check the family calendar. Then you check verbally with each family member - as they forget to write their own plans, meetings, trips etc on the calendar. Except, of course, for their birthdays, which are marked in letters three inches high in red ink as soon as a new calendar appears.
Next, if you do decide the overdraft will stretch to allow the trip, you have to sign forms. These range from agreements allowing them to take part in activities like abseiling down the Eiffel Tower, to forms exempting leaders from all responsibility if they fracture their skull doing this.
Then comes the meeting, where you'll meet the intrepid teachers/ youth leaders - or whoever else is brave enough to act "in loco parentis" for the duration. You'll go to this meeting, armed, mentally at least, with a list of questions that you hope other parents will ask.
Questions like "Will they really need £30 pocket money when they're going on a jungle survival trip miles from any shops?"
The next hurdle is the "suggested kit list." Any self-respecting young traveller will insist on having every single item on the list - plus all those essential extras their friends boast they will be taking.
Ignore this.
The secret is to use a good dose of common sense and the bargaining skills you've developed if you've survived being a parent until now. (Incidentally, these skills will stand you in good stead should you fancy a career change - stockbrokers, solicitors and sales people, could learn a thing or three about striking deals from parents.)
If the trip involves camping you'll also have to enter the world of sleeping mats, pot bags (no, not that sort, we're talking plates, cups and cutlery!) sleeping bags and serious boots.
After a few of these experiences you'll be qualified to organise trips to Everest, the Arctic Circle or outer Mongolia.
Finally, the morning will come when, after checking their bags for the hundredth time and dosing them with travel sickness tablets, you drop off your traveller and make a swift exit. (Your appearance as a parent is too embarrassing for you to be allowed to stay and wave them off on the coach.)
Day One after their departure, you collapse with exhaustion after all that extra effort.
Day Two - enjoy a bit of peace and quiet (this is the shortest phase).
By Day Three you begin to miss them slightly and worry that you didn't check whether the coach had seatbelts, or who was driving it.
Then - sooner rather than later if you're looking after their pet snake/rat/dog/pony, or in my case two smelly hamsters, an unfriendly rabbit, and two argumentative cats - you start counting the hours to when they and their bin liner full of smelly, muddy and wet-but-new washing will arrive safely home.
Kids - you can't live with 'em - but you can't live without 'em.
Copyright Sally Codman ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
