The Young & the Restless | Life begins at end of your comfort zone

And, of course, there’s also fitting all those must-do jobs into a shorter period before we go, such as mowing, cleaning out the fridge, putting out bins, organising the dog and all those little last-minute things right before you walk out of the door, such as closing blinds and turning off lights.

We left for our most recent holiday on Christmas Day afternoon, during a 26-hour blackout that was caused by the mini twister that swept through Shepparton on Christmas Eve, so all the lights were off anyway, along with everything else fed by electricity, including our garage door, which I had never opened manually before, so wasn’t entirely sure how.

The power being out added to the pre-holiday to-do list.

I had no use of my washing machine to wash towels and clothes on Christmas Eve, so I took a load of washing to my parents’ place on Christmas Day to use theirs while we ate lunch.

I then had to empty the fridges and freezers of all the food, as it had been spoiled in the summer heat.

It also meant leaving keys and instructions with family to come and check the house once the power was restored and turn off what needed to be turned off.

Despite the rocky start, we got away as planned in the afternoon and managed swiftly to forget about our responsibilities at home.

But some challenges of single parenting multiple children come on holiday with you.

I’ve spoken before about how all the driving, planning, organising, responsibility and expense for the four of us fall on one; about how my three children being a different gender to me makes me nervous that I have to send them into the men’s toilets where I can’t keep an eye on who’s around; about how there’s no mental break to duck off alone for even just five minutes when all four of you are staying in a confined hotel room and spending every waking minute together for days on end.

This holiday unlocked a new anxiety when I stepped off the plane with vertigo.

No sooner had we disembarked than I needed to sit again, desperately hoping my head would find the equilibrium on the horizon quickly and that the nausea would dissipate just as rapidly.

What if I passed out? Fell over? Started vomiting uncontrollably? Would my kids know what to do? Had I prepared them for this? Did we ever make a plan in the unlikely event the only responsible adult had a medical episode in unfamiliar territory?

Thankfully, nothing quite so drastic came of it — though it did take me hours to recover, and I’d have happily gone somewhere to rest while someone else entertained them that day.

Instead, we traipsed through a wax museum posing for umpteen photos with celebrity doppelgängers sculpted from wax, walked for kilometres around Darling Harbour and the Sydney CBD, dined in a pizza restaurant that utilised robot waiters, met with friends who live locally, visited the hotel pool for a swim, then headed back out into the streets for dinner.

There was no rest until bedtime.

And we all know holiday bedtime isn’t the same as regular bedtime.

My youngest was overstimulated from the day and struggled to wind down, so he kept us all awake much later than we’d have liked as he shuffled about the room, doing goodness knows what.

The next day presented another challenge I hadn’t come across on holiday with them before. Well, not to this degree, anyway.

When some of the group wants to do an activity but some don’t, you can easily accommodate everyone when you have a spare parent.

Even if both parents want to do the thing themselves, one will always sacrifice the experience if one of their children isn’t comfortable with it. That’s just an inbuilt parenting mechanism, right? We’re always gladly making sacrifices for them without even thinking twice.

But when there’s just one parent there, and a couple of the kids desperately want to go jet-boating (Mum is pretty keen, too), but the third child doesn’t want a bar of it, it gets tricky.

I did not want my older two kids to miss out on the experience, but they needed an adult chaperone.

I could not leave my youngest sitting unsupervised in Circular Quay while I took on that duty, so I began trying to persuade him to change his mind: “It’s safe; they wouldn’t be allowed to run these trips if it wasn’t. You’ll have so much fun. Mum will be right there next to you the whole time. I’ll hold your hand.”

When he didn’t budge, my gentle coaxing morphed more into a non-negotiable instruction. I broke the news that he was going to have to come along.

I felt so guilty for this because we teach our kids to speak up and put their foot down when they’re not comfortable with something.

We tell them nobody is allowed to force them to do things.

But here I was, forcing him to board a jet boat that was going to spin and slide around doing power-brake stops and fishtails.

Of course, I knew this wasn’t going to harm or traumatise him, and that is how I justified my ordering him to partake.

Then, the unexpected happened.

He plopped himself down on the concrete in Circular Quay, and when I approached him, he looked at me vacantly. Deadpan, he said: “Who are you? I don’t know you.”

Then, quite a few decibels louder, turning his head sideways to project his voice more to passersby than to me: “She’s trying to kidnap me!”

And again: “I don’t know her, stop trying to kidnap me!”

Equal parts horrified and amused (and also a touch embarrassed), I had to think quickly to extinguish the fire: “C’mon bud, the sooner you hop on the boat, the sooner we can go and get ice-cream.”

It turns out that was all the persuasion he needed (my exhalation of relief was palpable).

And then, after all of that, he spent the whole ride thoroughly thrilled, smiling more significantly and for longer than he had done the entire holiday.

When it was over, I said to him: “See, mate, imagine if you’d missed out on that much fun.”

Determined to maintain his stubbornness, he quantified: “Yes, but if I didn’t go, I never would have known how much fun I’d missed out on anyway, so it wouldn’t really matter.”

Of course, he was right.

But I still think it was a win-win situation — I won the battle, and he won the thrill beyond his comfort zone.