Not Going to Spain
25 April. 2020
A view from last year. I don't think we'll be seeing one like it again for a bit.
The kids are missing out on so much this year, and I don’t just mean my kids, all of them are. No matter what their ages, they are all a little bit stuck.
I’ve always promised mine that if I did something for one of them, that we’d do it for all of them. As they were so close in age, I’m talking about the older ones, it only seemed fair. There are only four years between the eldest and youngest of the three of them. None of them had music lessons as we couldn’t commit to so much on a termly basis for all of them. For the same reason none of had the opportunity to go on school ski trips. We did, however, make sure they all went on the year 8 Paris trip when they were twelve with their college and had anticipated the year 10 Spain trip too.
It was hard letting Katie go to France. Her trip was a very short time after the terrorist attacks in Paris. We thought about it long and hard and a lot of her friends pulled out, but we decided she should still go, especially as the trip hadn’t been cancelled. You can’t predict these things and without taking undue risks, if we all worried about everything, we’d never go anywhere. There are more and more acts of terrorism nowadays and many of them happen here in the UK, so unless we aren’t going to go out, we must take calculated risks occasionally.
I find it hard to let the kids go, but I’ve got more used to it as they’ve got older. It’s probably easier as they’ve got older to be honest as they’ve been able to stay in phone contact. When they were younger, probably around ten, they all went to London with their primary schools, and they weren’t allowed any contact home unless it was an emergency. So that made it harder. Mind you, I had several texts from Barney when he was in Paris two years ago, panicking because he had accidentally smashed his iPhone. He was so worried I’d be cross with him! I’m still not sure quite what happened to it though.
It’s been good, but coincidentally, because the kids are two years apart, they’ve always been offered the same residential trips. The school alternates them, so if they were in the year inbetween they would have been offered Italy instead of Spain. That would have opened another can of worms I am sure! I do like to keep things fair for them!
This year is different. Barn has been looking forward to going to Spain. They moved it forward slightly so he’d be back for his fifteenth birthday which is at the start of the summer. Joe and Katie both missed the end of school to go away which was a bit strange for them. Of course though, with everything that is going on at the moment, I can’t see it going ahead. It hasn’t been officially cancelled, nor have we had any word of whether we will get our money back for it. But school isn’t on at the moment, so I don’t see them taking a whole year group abroad even if everything is back to normal in a few months. It’s sad that he is missing out and I do feel disappointed for him, but to be honest, realistically I think even if it was to go ahead, I wouldn’t want him to go. It’s a shame there is so much to miss out on, but I do want to keep everyone safe, and for me, that means keeping us all at home as much as we can at the moment. The year seems to be on hold, at least for now. I hope that we’ll get the chance to do some nice things next year, but as long as we stay safe, at least we should have the opportunity to.
Take care everyone and thank you for reading.
Claire x
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