You planned it for months. They were done by day two.
I am sorry for being brutally honest here, but at times I get this thought: why did we plan this vacation at all? I know as a mother I should not say that. But I am a human being too.
Every parent knows this face.
You have been planning this holiday since February. You have compared hotels, read reviews at midnight, booked the water park tickets in advance because they were cheaper that way. You have spent money you saved carefully and thought hard about spending. You have taken leave you had to negotiate for.
And on day two, somewhere between the ticket counter and the first ride, your six year old looks up at you with an expression that says they would quite like to go back to the hotel now.
Not tired exactly. Not unhappy exactly. Just done.
And something in you sinks, because you can already feel the next four days going the same way.
Nobody does the maths on a holiday day
At home, your child walks from the car to the school gate. From the sofa to the dining table. Around the park for forty minutes and then home for a nap or a snack or an hour of doing nothing.
On holiday, they walk from the hotel to the taxi. Through a terminal. Across a theme park spread over twenty acres. Up and down a market street. Back to the hotel the long way because you wanted to see the sunset.
It is four to six times the walking of an ordinary day. In unfamiliar heat. On unfamiliar ground. Without the nap, the quiet hour, or the floor of their own bedroom to collapse onto.
We do not plan for that because we are not counting. We are counting attractions, not kilometres. And then we are surprised when a child who walks to school every day cannot manage a botanical garden.
They are not being difficult. The day is genuinely harder than anything we have ever asked of them before.
Nobody mentions growing pains, and that is the other thing going on here.
Growing pains are real. They are common in children roughly between three and twelve, they usually show up as aching legs in the evening or at night, and they tend to be worse on days when a child has been unusually active.
Which describes a holiday almost perfectly.
So your five year old is not only walking three times their usual distance. They are also going to bed with legs that genuinely ache, waking up less rested than you think, and starting the next day already behind.
Day three is always harder than day one. This is why.
Excitement runs out before the day does
Here is the part that catches every parent off guard.
Children do not fade gradually. They run entirely on enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is not a renewable resource at that age. It burns extremely bright and then it simply stops.
Your child was thrilled at breakfast. Thrilled in the taxi. Thrilled at the gate. And then at eleven in the morning, apropos of nothing visible, the thrill is gone and they are sitting on a kerb refusing to look at anything.
This is not bad behaviour. This is a small person whose body has outrun their excitement and who has no vocabulary for the gap between the two. What comes out instead is whining, or stubbornness, or tears over something unrelated.
And once that happens, the day is effectively over. You can drag it along for another two hours but nobody is enjoying it anymore, including you.
What actually gets lost
This is the part I want to be honest about, because it is rarely written down.
It is not just the child's holiday that disappears. It is yours.
You stop looking at the garden because you are carrying someone through it. You stop talking to your partner because one of you is always negotiating with a four year old about walking another hundred metres. You take fewer photographs. You skip the thing you were most looking forward to because getting there would involve a twenty minute walk and you cannot face the conversation.
You spent a fortune and used your leave and planned for months, and somewhere in the middle of it the holiday quietly turned into logistics.
Then you come home and everyone asks how it was, and you say it was lovely, and you mean it, and you also know you did not actually enjoy most of it.
Do I really need a stroller? My child has already outgrown it.
This is the question every parent asks, and it is the right question. The honest answer is that your child has not outgrown needing to sit down. They have outgrown the pram.
Those are two different things, and nothing on the market acknowledged the difference.
Baby prams stop making sense around three. They are too small, too low, too heavy, and a six year old will refuse one on principle because it is a baby thing and they are not a baby. That refusal is not vanity. It matters to them, and it should matter to us.
So parents end up with nothing at all for the exact years when the walking demand goes up the most. Four to eight is a real gap, and it is the gap where holidays get hard.
That is the space the Get Going was built for.
Lightweight enough to move through a crowded theme park without a fight. Sturdy enough to take an older child comfortably. Folds in seconds when a taxi pulls up or a tram arrives or you reach the boarding gate. And designed so that a six year old sits in it without feeling like they have been demoted.
It is not there so your child never walks. It is there so that when they have genuinely had enough, there is somewhere for them to sit, and the day can continue instead of ending.
What it actually changes
The difference is not really about the walking. It is about everything downstream of the walking.
A child who gets to sit in the middle of a long day comes back with some of their enthusiasm restored. A parent whose hands are free is a parent who is present, taking photographs, pointing things out, having a conversation. The exit walk at the end of a long day stops being the worst part of it.
And the mood holds. That is the whole thing. The mood holds, and the holiday stays a holiday.
The honest advice
If you are planning a trip and quietly wondering whether your five or six year old will manage all of it on their feet, the answer is probably not. Not because there is anything wrong with them. Because even though we might think of our kids as big enough, they still are small and they still get tired.
Take something. Use it on the days you need it and leave it folded on the days you do not.
You planned this holiday for months. You should get to enjoy it too.
Ruchi