Just back from 2 weeks with the family in Puerto Pollenca, Mallorca. We had a good holiday, doing virtually nothing except going to the beach or playing by the pool. From the special needs family point of view, the first thing to say is that that Palmair made the journey very easy and were helpful right from start to finish. This is in contrast to a previous holiday we had where the transfer coach nearly left without us as we took so long to make our way from the plane!

The resort town itself was completely flat despite being surrounded by impressive mountains. However we'd taken a heavy, wide double buggy to help get the kids around and found that the curbs were really tall with no slopes, even at crossings. Combined with the fact that there were lamp posts and trees in the middle of the pavements we found we had to walk on the roads a lot of the time! You forget how accessible England has become until you go elsewhere.

The kids really enjoyed themselves. From our point of view, being surrounded by mainstream families did present some problems so we perhaps didn't switch off as much as we'd hoped. Mixing predominantly in the special needs world, I think that it is sometimes easy to forget how special needs our children are as everything is so relative.  It was also quite obvious to see how difficult our son finds interacting with other children of his age, because of his difficulties with speach and clumsy coordination. It made sad sometimes as he is always so keen to make friends and does not understand why others are not as forthcoming. Worse still, I think that it was also quite noticeable how certain families tried to engineer situations in order to  exclude our two - the most obvious was when one parent bought ice creams for all the children in the pool apart from ours! It made me wonder who it was that had the problems!!

Before we went, I was a bit worried about how we would manage our son's low salt diet but that worked out fine in the end. The local supermarket sold salt free pureed tomatoes, so the diet was tomatoes and fish, tomatoes and mince, tomatoes and chicken etc. Kids seemed to like it though, as long as they got an ice cream afterwards!

Certainly we didn't realise how much our stress levels had dropped on holiday until we got home to find that our son's next nephrology appointment has been moved to Monday morning, which I can't possibly make. My husband will have to try and get the morning off work to take him (its an hours drive away). We received yet another factually inaccurate letter from education to sort out and the transport for our daughter to school will definitely be with the newly appointed stranger rather than our friend who previously had the role of escort. When is the next holiday?!