Our summer holiday in Lanzarote

We've always been used to taking our holidays out of season, so I don't know how we're going to cope when we have little ones at school and have to brave holiday resorts in the school holidays, along with the associated higher costs. We've just got back from a lovely week in Lanzarote, at the Flamingo Beach Resort. It was actually our second visit to the resort, we stayed there in January last year when Harry was just 2 and I was pregnant with Mia. It suited us so perfectly and was so reasonably priced that we couldn't find anywhere better when we were looking for our next family holiday. I also found preparing for the holiday much less stressful knowing that we were going some familiar, especially as it was our first trip abroad with the two of them!

We contacted the manager in advance to ask for a room in a similar area as the one that we had last time and he allocated us the same room which was a bit surreal, as everything was just the same yet very different! The holiday was all-inclusive with a fair choice of food, but our little ones are so fussy that they wouldn't touch most of the food, they spent the week surviving on bread and butter, bananas and ice cream! The buffet restaurant did mean that we spent most of the meal taking it in turns to go and fetch food rather than sitting down together, and I had to comfort Mia everytime Ram left the table as she would cry hysterically until he came back! The breakfast was the best meal of the day, with plenty of goodies to fill you up, and the waiters were very polite about the amount of mess that Mia left behind, as the highchairs didn't have trays so most of the food ended up on the floor.

They were both really good on the flight, it did get a bit desperate at times trying to keep them entertained, but we didn't have any major grumpiness and I actually managed to get Mia to sleep for a while each time by rocking her about a bit.

Mia loved her first proper beach experience, we plonked her down on the sand and she crawled about like a mad thing. She did a few face plants and ended up with mouthfuls of sand, but it didn't seem to bother her. Harry was scared of the sea to begin with, but they both became bolder as the week progressed - Harry went in up to his waist and Mia was quite happy crawling about in the shallow bits. Flamingo Beach is directly opposite the hotel and it is a man-made sandy beach sheltered with concrete blocks so that you can swim without the waves being too big. I loved standing in the water and watching all the fish swimming about. We bought a net to try and catch some but failed miserably until the last day when Ram found some rockpools to trap them in (I am assured that he caught some in the sea as well after I had taken Mia back to the room!).

I wasn't pregnant this time so I was able to enjoy the all-inclusive alcohol, although a couple of peach schnapps with lemonade (my drink of choice in my younger days) was enough for me. We tried some of the cocktails but they reminded me a bit of the ones that they used to make up at university in bins and ladle out into plastic cups.

The evening entertainment wasn't that great and wasn't really aimed at ones as little as ours but that wasn't really a problem as they are used to going to bed early so we just stuck them in bed and sat quietly in the bedroom - I got through several books on my Kindle. We made an exception on a couple of evenings and put them to bed in our room so that we could sit up together in the living room - well we didn't want to miss Eurovision!

We didn't pay the extra for wi-fi access so we had an internet free week (apart from when Ram went internet hunting with his phone and managed to connect briefly and download the news headlines and his e-mails). We did have a television with BBC1 and BBC2 though, as well as a children's channel which was most useful. I actually didn't miss my phone as much as I thought I would, even less so when I returned to check my e-mail and found that I hadn't missed anything at all anyway! I've still got a lot of blog reading to catch up with though. My biggest problem was that I discovered that I rely hugely on the clock on my phone, so I never had any idea what time it was!

We went down to the beach everyday and in the swimming pools most days, as well as chilling out in our room during the hottest part of the day. I was even able to spend lots of time just reading and relaxing.

The little ones went straight to sleep each night, they must have been shattered. In fact on our last evening, Mia fell asleep in her highchair at the dinner table, poor thing! They also slept somewhat better than they usually manage at home, clearly I need to be making them run about more at home and not letting them nap!

You can read a full review of the Flamingo Beach Resort here in case you are looking for a family holiday destination because we really would recommend it. It's not the sort of holiday that we would have considered before children at all, but with our new family unit, for the next few years at least this sort of thing seems to suit us perfectly.