Holiday Blues

It's school holidays again and parents across the country and queuing up at doctors surgeries and complaining about the unfairness of it all while praying that that long Summer break never happens!
You meet the, 'thank the Lord that's over' troupe in the playground on the first day back after every school break...and it's generally not the children rushing to meet their mates, it's the parents. Both grateful and relieved that school is back in and children are out of their hair...many parents I hear regularly complain that school days are too short and don't cover weekends.
For me, the problem with school holidays isn't my children, it's the children of others. I spend all my working days being nice to other people's children, I would just like to spend holiday time being able to be nice to my own. So why can't I? Because of the holiday-hating-brigade parents who kick their children out the second morning breaks and then just hope the rest of the world will watch them.
And what do these children do?
They hang over my garden gate and reduce my children to an amoebic state of existence...within two minutes of contact, my children's IQ.s' drop to that of an Alsatian, the vocabulary diminishes to, 'wat' and 'y'wat' and games such as 'throw the ball into your brothers face then laugh' become the order of the day.
And so I find myself with two alternatives:
a) Turn my children into couch potatoes - invest in tonnes of DVDs, wii games and ban them from playing in the garden
b) turn everyday into a fun filled blur of activities and days out
Both options are both expensive and unpleasant.
Perhaps there is a further alternative...large waterpistols and an electrified gate!