An HONEST Guide to keeping kids entertained over the summer holiday!

Amanda Wilkie. Updated July 30th, 2019

Keeping young kids entertained over the summer holidays can be a challenge. Hearing “I’m booooored” over and over again can make even the most patient of parents want to puncture their own eardrums. There are articles everywhere with suggestions for fun-filled activities to do with your precious angels but, let’s be serious, the majority of them don’t ever mention any of the downsides. They give you the Mary Poppins version when, in reality, entertaining kids can often be more like a version of The Exorcist, including the projectile vomiting. Which is why we’ve put together…

1. Visit a farm

A great opportunity to get some fresh air and exercise, though it’s pretty much guaranteed that at least one of you will get covered in mud, or worse. Also a high chance of witnessing randy animals trying to mount each other. You’ll then have to attempt to convince your offspring that they’re actually just giving each other piggybacks.

2. Go to a Theme Park

You’ll probably need to sell a kidney to pay the entrance fees. The queues will make you mutter swear words you weren’t even aware you knew. There will be a tantrum because you refuse to spend six quid on a bag of chips when you’ve spent all day carting round a cool box the size of a small village in France that’s full of nutritious snacks . You’ll probably be the one to have that tantrum. If you ask what their favourite part of the day was, the reply will be “Going to the gift shop.”

3. Check out a soft play centre

Probably what hell is actually like. There will be at least one terror-causing kid whose mum is oblivious to the fact that her little darling is trying to push all the other children headfirst off the top of the big slide. The ball pool contains about 103 different diseases. 17 of which haven’t yet even been discovered.

4. Do arts and crafts

You’ll spend 30 minutes setting out all the materials. They’ll get bored after 10 minutes but, in that time, will still have managed to get paint in their hair and glue themselves to the cat. You’ll be finding glitter everywhere for months, even if you deliberately hid the glitter so they couldn’t use it.

5. Take a trip to the park

Even though dogs aren’t allowed in the playground area, someone will still manage to tread in dog shit. Your child will take great delight in pointing out to everyone the funny face drawn on the slide, which is actually graffiti of a spurting knob. As visiting the park is free though, and you can probably sit down on a bench to supervise, you’ll make the most of it anyway. Well, until your phone battery drops to below 10%, then it’s time to leave.

6. Go to the cinema

You’ll spend more on the tickets than you would on a decent bottle of gin. You’ll inevitably manage to forget the bag of snacks you were going to smuggle in and end up having to pay an obscene amount of money for popcorn, most of which will end up getting dropped on the floor. You’ll only get to see approximately 18 minutes of the film as the rest of the time you’ll be doing trips back and forth to the toilets.

7. Bake some cupcakes

No matter how hard you try to keep this activity as mess free as possible, you will fail miserably. Your kid will cough or sneeze, or do both, into the bowl of cake batter. The icing, to decorate the cakes, will end up pretty much everywhere except on top of the cakes. Most of it will be sneakily eaten by your child who will then be bouncing off the walls for the next four hours.

8. Visit the local swimming pool

After splashing around for a bit in chlorinated wee water and hoping you haven’t caught a verruca, you’ll have to begin the battle of the changing rooms. You’ll be soaking wet and freezing, as you have to dry and dress your offspring first, which is tantamount to trying to wrestle a breakdancing octopus into an empty Pringles tube.

Good luck.