I thought, when I was a younger person, with a neck that still swivelled gracefully and hair that hadn’t yet begun to thin, that having a lot of children wasn’t going to be very expensive. The rationale was that they could share clothes, they could sleep in bunkbeds, I would make simple lovely one-pot meals that everyone would eat (thus capitalising on the economics of crowd-feeding – cheaper by bulk and batches), and that we would entertain ourselves instead of needing trips to Thorpe Park and Legoland. That we would eventually save on babysitters by getting the older ones to do it. We would borrow things and share things and everyone would learn to have cheap brotherly home made fun. That we would reuse the cots and the car seats and the buggies and the sleepsuits and just get on with it.

I didn’t bank on quite a few things, in this early, sweetly naive financial assessment, such as how often those now big people break my stuff, or incur needless costs in big, dumb ways. I didn’t think much about future holidays where everyone brings friends and everyone is now adult-sized (with adult-sized luggage and adult-sized fares) and everyone has inherited their parent’s snobbish attitude to food and wine and everyone equals a minivan. Our holiday to Gozo has been over for a week but OH THE COST will be with us for a jolly long time after.

Here’s some annoying money-related things that irk me, roiling my guts with the pain of it all:

To save on costs, we all went for the early flights there and back and that meant 2am and 3am violent unnatural wakings and terrifying vomit-inducing coach and taxi rides to airports (if you are Otis, that is – the kind of kid who routinely vomits just as soon as we pull up to Gatwick’s unloading bay after looking pale for the hour long drive, or chucks up in the sea after the boat ride has well and truly concluded, or sticks his head out of the cab and spews into the wind that blows it all back into the car). These early morning trips probably ended up saving up about £10 each and we are STILL feeling the aftereffects of travelling all night last weekend to get home. Reader, this kind of economising is just not worth it.

We also went for the soft hand luggage under-the-seats-in-front-of-you option rather than cabin bags but Casper was determined to take his favourite hard cased square bag with him even though we said ‘no – take a backpack like everyone else’. Easyjet are wankers, obviously, so when we got there the Easyjet woman took one look at Casper’s boxy bag and said ‘That will be £48 for your oversized bag” and when we said “NO WAY, it is certainly not oversized because when using your VR online tool it seemed to roughly fit,” she said “Put it into the wire cage over there to see if it fits then” with a kind of sigh. It fitted into the cage perfectly except for a millimetre of plastic hard wheels poking out of the top. We pushed and we rearranged but she remained steadfast in her conviction. “Oversized”, she said, taking our payment and (the kids are adamant about this) ending with an under-the-breath throwaway burn at them: “IN YOUR FACE!”. I wasn’t so sure, as she was an actual middle-aged woman, but who really knows?

Casper also left his phone in the transfer van at the end of the holiday and by the time he realised, the van had sped off. I emailed the transfer hire company to send it back to us once they had found it and it has so far cost us £125 for couriering and ‘admin’. We might also be stung at customs.

There were ten of us on holiday and that meant we couldn’t all fit into the biggest minivan on the island, a 9-seater. So we had to resort to buses and eventually cabs for the older kids. The older kids also got quite keen on a refreshing glass or two of Maltese wine at every meal which, though cheap per bottle, quickly added up. One night the little buggers ordered cocktails each and I nearly exploded with euro-related rage.

They broke two lampshades at the villa. The first was because one teenager got skittish and outraged about a fly being in his room and he chased it around while trying to swat it dead with his tshirt, and the tshirt caught the glass lampshade and it shattered all over his bed. The second lampshade got broken because the other teenagers decided to throw hard balls around in their room and misfired, hitting the glass lampshade and shattering it all over the beds. I mean, FFS.

The breaking of things continued today because another teenager of mine throw a pillow at another brother but it missed the kid and hit a vintage mid century ceramic vase which smashed all over the kitchen. At this point I was a bit sick of hearing the unnecessary and unbudgeted for costs incurring by my large and unwieldy thoughtless oafs, and have today constituted a policy whereby the suckers have to pay for breakages (and oversized luggage and lost phone courier charges) themselves. This has caused a lot of tears and handwringing and outrage but how else will they understand this stuff?

The other thing the children do now is that they eat all the things. But not the things I would like them to eat. On Gozo, the watermelon was left to go drippy and soft, the thoughtfully quartered plums and peaches turned brown. My tomato salad got optimistically rejigged until the heat and the juices combined, turning it into a kind of terrifying prison hooch. The massive tub of locally-made gelato, asked for repeatedly, got ignored once bought and transferred from the little bakery down the road into our villa freezer, inexplicably losing its appeal on the walk home. The cherry croissants were rejected as being ‘too sugary’. Mark, who ALWAYS buys a chunk of smoked processed cheese whenever we go anywhere, despite my protests that no one else likes it, ghosted the little cheesy stump until it grew a smoke-infused fur all over its surface. He also bought sad mushrooms that sat in a bag getting funky and damp.

But then we went out and the children’s appetites returned once in Gozo’s main tourist square, trying to order steaks and pork ribs and chips and two drinks each at least and I was DYING – the cost! I said. Why don’t you eat the watermelon? I said. Keep your costs down! I said. The budget is FINISHED! You’ve spent it all, you little hungry pests! But it was no good. I was outnumbered and overspent.

Here’s some photos though because actually, who cares? I can always sell a vehicle.

Gelato. Eaten at the bakery, but no where else:

A beach with red sand, rocks, waves, and a taverna with expensive things to order from:

A little bit of Catholic awesomeness:

More of the above:

The bluest sea:

Beloved and a big boat:

For the Bishop of Gozo:

Beheaded:

Me contemplating the money running out and deciding to smile anyway:

The inland sea in Dwerja Bay:

Spending money: