And this year, I learnt a few valuable lessons from my time off.

Lesson 1: Taking three teenage girls for a week to a caravan park full of teenage boys was a stroke of pure genius. Every morning I'd get up and make sure I had everything in place: books, magazines, crosswords, coffee and wine for when the big hand hit the 12 and the little hand was on the 5. Oh, and occasionally I'd remember I had two progeny and their offsider roaming around somewhere.

Lesson 2: If you have a daughter who is a gymnast, milk it for all its worth. I wish now I'd charged an admission fee every time she was on the jumping pillow. Her back flips attracted a bigger crowd than Justin Bieber - and she was always on time and didn't spit on anyone.

Lesson 3: People who are normally competent drivers get "holiday" brain. The aforementioned daughter and I were walking back to the caravan park from a nearby store along the side of the road - which was the only version of a footpath in cooee - when a car decided to swerve in and park. Apparently we were either invisible or mowing down two pedestrians was on this bloke's bucket list. We both moved that fast I reckon even Usain was worried his 9.58 was under threat.

Lesson 4: The beach in summer is fine - if you want to share a 10 centimetre by 10 centimetre piece of sand with half of Victoria. It got to the stage if I saw one more naked toddler, one more kid screaming because sand was in their eyes (you're at the beach, it's an occupational hazard) or one more big momma in a string bikini I was going to lose my cool and do something stupid, like swim straight after my lunch.

Lesson 5: Buy icecream from the supermarket. Apparently icecream from beachside icecream shops is made in solid gold buckets and contains precious ingredients found only two hundred feet under the Atlantic Ocean. That, or the owners of these shops use a captive audience to charge like a bulls with a really sore spot.