What Parents Actually Do on Holiday

There is a version of the family holiday that lives on Instagram, and then there is the real one. The Instagram one has everybody in matching linen, golden hour, a toddler laughing at the sea like it just told him a joke. The real one has you sat on the edge of a strange bed at 7:48pm, in the dark, holding your breath, because the four year old has finally, finally gone quiet and you are terrified that the sound of you swallowing might wake him back up again.

If you know, you know.

Nobody really warns you about the evenings. They warn you about the flights, and the car seats, and whether the little one will eat anything other than beige food for a fortnight. But the evenings are their own strange little world, and honestly they are one of my favourite bits of any trip now, once I made my peace with what they actually are. So here is the honest version. Not the linen one. The one where you are wide awake at half eight with a warm glass of wine and absolutely nowhere to go.

The Great Bedtime Standoff

Let me start here because this is where the evening is won or lost. Bedtime on holiday is not bedtime at home. At home you have the routine, the blackout blind, the specific teddy, the third glass of water that is never actually about water. On holiday you have a travel cot in the corner of a room with the wrong curtains and a child who has clocked, correctly, that the normal rules have gone out the window.

We have tried everything over the years. The “we will just let them crash when they crash” approach, wich sounds relaxed and grown up right upto the moment it is 10pm and everyone is crying, including possibly me. The rigid stick-to-home-times approach, wich falls apart the second there is a pool and a kids disco. What actually works, most of the time, is somewhere in the messy middle. A slightly later bedtime, a proper wind down, and a bit of grace when it all goes sideways.

If you are properly struggling with sleep away from home, the NHS has a genuinely useful, no nonsense guide to children’s sleep and bedtime routines that is worth a read before you go, rather than at midnight when you are googling in a panic. I wish I had read it about four holidays sooner than I did.

But eventually, one way or another, the room goes quiet. And then you are in it.

The Long Quiet Bit In The Middle

Here is the thing people do not tell you. You cannot leave. If you are in a single hotel room, or a small apartment with paper thin walls, and the baby is asleep three feet away, you are not going anywhere. There is no popping out. There is no restaurant. The idea of a candlelit dinner for two is, for these few years of your life, a beautiful fantasy that belongs to other people.

So the evening becomes about making the very best of a very small, very quiet space. And you would be surprised, genuinely, how nice that can be once you stop mourning the version where you go dancing.

The first job is usually the whisper. Every parent knows the holiday whisper, that flat, careful, barely there voice you use for two hours straight until your throat aches. You have entire conversations in it. You argue in it, occasionally, which is its own kind of skill, having a proper disagreement about who packed the sun cream while making absolutely no noise whatsoever.

Wine On The Balcony, If You Are Lucky

If the gods have smiled on you and there is a balcony, or even just a little strip of tiled floor outside the sliding door, this is the jackpot. You drag a plastic chair out, you leave the door open a crack so you can hear the little one, and you sit. Warm air. A drink that cost far too much from the minibar. The distant sound of other people’s holidays carrying on without you.

I have had some of the best, most honest chats with my other half on holiday balconies at nine at night, half a bottle of lukewarm rosé between us, both of us too tired to pretend to be anything other than exactly who we are. There is something about being trapped in a small space with nowhere to be that makes people actually talk. Who knows.

And when the talking runs out, and it does, because you are shattered, then comes the entertainment.

The Tiny Screen Portion Of The Evening

Somebody, and it is usually me, will have downloaded something before the trip specially for this. A box set. A film. Something you have both been meaning to watch for about a year and a half. You prop the phone or the tablet up against the kettle, or that weird little wardrobe ledge, angle it just right, and the two of you huddle round a six inch screen like it is a campfire.

It is ridiculous. It is also lovely. You share one set of headphones, one earbud each, which means you are basically pressed cheek to cheek to hear anything, and you have to keep pausing every time the aircon kicks in. Half the time one of you falls asleep before the good bit and has to have it explained the next morning by the pool.

That is a holiday telly with small children. A tiny screen, a shared earphone, and a fifty fifty chance you both make it to the end.

The Bit Where The Phone Becomes The Casino

Once the film is paused because someone is snoring, and the wine is finished, there is often this last little pocket of the evening. You are tired but not quite ready to sleep, you have run out of chat, and you do not want to put a light on. This is when a lot of parents I know quietly reach for their phones, not to doomscroll, but for a bit of low key grown up fun that fits in the dark and the quiet. For some it is a puzzle, or a word game. For plenty of others it is a few small spins on something, and roulette is the classic pick because it is easy to follow with half your brain switched off, you just pick a colour or a number and watch the wheel go round. If that is your thing, a properly regulated online casino like swift casino on your phone gives you that little flicker of a night out from a hotel bed, red or black, in or out, done in thirty seconds so it does not eat your whole evening. Swift Casino is one of the licensed options a lot of people use for exactly this kind of low stakes wind down, and the sensible move is always to set yourself a tiny limit before you start, treat it like the price of a coffee, and stop when it is gone. It is a bit of fun, nothing more, and it should stay that way.

That paragraph aside, most of the evening really is just the two of you, a small room, and the quiet.

Actually Talking To Each Other Again

I want to come back to this one because it genuinely surprised me. Before kids, my partner and I could go a whole weekend barely having a real conversation, because there was always something else. A friend to meet, a job to do, a screen to look at in a big empty living room where you can easily avoid one another.

On holiday with a sleeping toddler you cannot avoid anyone. You are two feet apart in the dark with nothing to do. And so you talk. Proper talk, the kind you forget you are capable of. We have planned entire life changes on holiday evenings. We have sorted out arguments that had been quietly festering for months. We have laughed until we had to bite the pillow so we did not wake the baby, which is its own special kind of torture, silent laughing, tears streaming, absolute agony.

It is not the romantic evening you pictured when you booked. It is better in a weird way, more real, and definitely more us.

Planning Tomorrow, And Sneakily The Next One

There is always a bit of admin too. One of you will be lying there with the phone glow on your face, quietly planning the next day. Where is breakfast? What time does the pool open. Is it going to rain. Can we get away with the aquarium or will it be rammed. This is important work and it usually falls to whichever of us is the planner, and reader, that is me every single time.

And then, and every parent will recognise this, about four nights into a holiday you start, very quietly, planning the next one. You cannot help it. You are having such a nice time in your tiny quiet room that you open a travel tab and start looking at somewhere new for next year. My one bit of proper advice here, boring as it is, is to book through an ABTA protected travel provider when you can, especially for anything with flights involved, because when you are travelling with little ones the last thing you want is to be left stranded if something goes wrong. Learn that one the slightly hard way, so you do not have to.

It is a strange thing, planning your escape from a holiday while you are still on it. But that is parenting all over, is it not. Always one eye on the next thing.

Then It Is Your Bedtime Too, At About Half Nine

And this is the punchline of the whole evening. After all of that, the whispering, the wine, the tiny screen, the big talks, you look at the clock and it is 9:40pm and you are absolutely done. So you brush your teeth in the dark using your phone torch, you climb into a bed that is inevitably too close to the travel cot, and you go to sleep at an hour that your pre-kids self would have found frankly embarrassing.

You will be woken at 6am. You know this. The little one does not care that you are on holiday, their body clock is set to farmyard rooster no matter what timezone you are in. But for now, for these few quiet hours, you got a little bit of your old self back. A drink, a chat, a laugh, a film you did not finish.

That is the secret nobody tells you. The evenings are not lost when you have small kids on holiday. They just get very small, and very quiet, and if you lean into it rather than fighting it, they turn into some of the best bits of the whole trip.

So next time you are sitting on the edge of a strange bed at 7:48pm, holding your breath, do not feel sorry for yourself. The good bit is coming. It just starts a lot later, and a lot quieter, than it used to.