Our first family holiday and poonamis

I’d looked at the list a million times, it was definitely all essential. Yet as I looked at the mountain of clothes and equipment gathered in my bedroom I knew it was going to take a miracle to fit it all into the car. More than this I had to at least try to squash things into bags in the hope of making it appear less as I knew the first thing my husband would say when he walked in the door was that I had over packed and there was no way this was all fitting into the car.

So the next 20 minutes were like a cartoon sketch with me desperately vacuum packing and bouncing on top of suitcases, willing the zips to close whilst saying prayers to any gods that would listen. Eventually I had finished. I had managed to make the pile look half the size it had originally. This was one of the proudest moments in my life! After all I had just performed a miracle.

Later when my husband returned home he took one look at the pile and said oh wow you’ve packed all of your stuff and mine already. Well done. Biting my lip I mumbled a reply that actually no this was all just for the baby and I hadn’t even begun to gather up any of our stuff yet. I watched as the cogs started to turn and the colour drained from his face. And cue pointless round and round ‘discussion’ about the fact that I had over packed, needed to take things out, wouldn’t need it anyway and it wouldn’t fit in the car.

Admittedly in the morning the car was packed to the rafters. I had bags all around my feet and the back seats and foot wells were also filled with stuff. There literally wasn’t a spare inch anywhere in the car BUT it did all fit. Ha ha smug victory dance and lots of ‘I told you so’ and we were off.

We arrived at our holiday home for the week and within half an hour the first poonami had occurred.

By day 5 of continuous poonamis my husband had to admit that actually I hadn’t over packed at all and in fact we could have done with more clothes. We were using the washing machine constantly when we were in the house and had wet clothes hanging from every door, chair and available surface.

Once again I was reminded that every bad situation has a silver lining. No my ideal picture perfect holiday doesn’t include poonamis but it did enable me to say over and over again I was right. You didn’t believe me but I was right. The satisfaction of that went quite a long way to cancel out the frustration of trying to deal with poonamis whilst on holiday.

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