Getting back to the reality of a nine-to-five schedule is depressing when you've had a fortnight of leisure, getting up late and dividing your time between a shady veranda and a sun-soaked, azure blue swimming pool.

Thankfully, returning to the house a few days previously, after almost two weeks away, had been easier than anticipated.

Having left our eldest 'home-alone', I was expecting to find a sink piled high with pots and pans and cereal bowls littering the lounge floor – but everything was remarkably tidy.

He had forgotten to water the plants – our beautiful hydrangeas either side of the front door were flagging and one house plant was dead and well beyond revival.

But the dog and cat were still very much alive, so he had remembered there were other living things in the house besides himself.

It was the longest I had been away from any of my children – our first holiday without our first born – and I hadn't looked forward to it at all.

I spent a small fortune on mobile phone calls from Spain to check up on him, but it is difficult to gauge how things are really going from such a distance.

Despite our careful preparation of a manual covering how the cooker, washing machine and microwave worked, he had not felt confident enough to launder his own T-shirts and had saved up quite a pile for me to put through the wash on our return.

The majority of the ready meals I had stockpiled in the freezer also remained untouched, so he probably didn't have the healthiest of diets while we were away, although his grandma had come to the rescue on several occasions, whisking him over to her house for a roast dinner.

I think he missed our company and found the house strangely quiet, but it was probably a positive experience for him as he's found out he can stand on his own two feet.

He could potentially fly the nest next summer and if he heads for university will need to be self-reliant.

It was also the first cutting of the apron strings for me and to my surprise I found out I could survive too.