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6th May 2018
05:00pm BST

3. The airplane
The airplane bit is always going to be a pretty intense few hours. By boarding a plane with an infant you are disobeying the only hard and fast rule of parenthood: Never be trapped in a confined space with a baby/toddler and several hundred hostile strangers. Buckle up, even if you're only off to Cork... it's going to be a LOOOONNG flight.
4. Seeing their tiny minds being blown by air travel
As much as the travel time can be a trying ordeal, it is still pretty amazing to see their big eyes grow even wider at the clouds passing by outside their window. Totes adorbs.
5. The seat-kicking
If heading away by car, by the second or third hour of incessant seat-kicking you may find yourself considering "the duck 'n' roll" – MacGyver's patented exit-from-a-moving vehicle move. It can get pretty intense as each seat-kick starts to feel distinctly more like a head-kick but hold on, good times are just a few (234) miles away.
6. Soak it all up
Once you hit your destination, the luxury of spending a whole week as a family proves that all the hassle (not to the mention having the mango slices confiscated at customs) was totally worth it, just to see them splashing in the waves and enjoying the sun.
7. The Sunblock
Oh right, the sun – the EVIL sun that will infiltrate every single defensive measure we put in place to protect our babies. It is pretty much inevitable that in the constant quest to protect THEM from the sun's rays (by holding them down during fraught and sticky applications of sunblock, for which they will hate you, by the way) YOU will invariably wind up getting burned. It's some kind of law of parenthood.
8. The mingling of holiday smell and baby smell
As intensly irritating as the constant sunblock battle is, the mingling of holiday smell and baby smell as you cuddle the sweaty, cranky, overheating baba makes it all worthwhile. Soak it up, there's only one first family holiday. In the blink of an eye they'll be in Ayia Napa, and you'll be ringing them every hour to make sure they're not getting sunburnt (or worse).
9. The "I'm in the ocean for the first time" face
The perfect blend of freaked out and freakin' amazing...
10. The return journey
Sure the seat-kicking/plane-hell will be even harder to take when returning home after the first family holiday but these, sometimes frustrating, sometimes intense and always happy, memories will last a lifetime.

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