A huge part of family travel revolves around keeping young kids entertained, happy and out of other guests hair.

While this makes for a memorable trip for the kids (which is a huge part of why any parent would choose to travel with kids) it exhausts the parents.

We did sneak a few moments of rest in while the kids visited the kids club (which they loved, thank god! NO GUILT) but majority of the hours in the day were focused on fun, fun , fun! Thank goodness Smugglers Cove was an all inclusive, so many of the activities were included.  . . but alas, not all!

The kids loved the jet skiing (called it scooby doo-ing for some strange reason!) We would rent one for half an hour and give them each 10 minutes to ride!  Just enough to break up the day and tonnes of fun for Dad!

Our kiddies are horse lovers so an evening ride on the beach and being able to walk through the waves on a pony hit the right mark!  We did use this as a bribe for good behavior so got our money’s worth from it!

And we swam . . . oh man did we swim. I couldn’t believe that the kids would be in the water, be it pool or ocean from after breakfast until dinner.  We would drag them out around lunch and throw them some BBQ chicken for sustenance . . . oh, and fruit smoothies! We lived on those!

We kept active and despite a bit of grumbling we tried our best to play. This wasn’t a holiday about US (as in me and the hubby) it was a family holiday . . . and that meant our goal was to spend time together! And really, the fun stuff is what it is all about, right. .  .