The joys of Easter are quite lost on me

With four young children to contend with, no school break is ever welcome in our household but the next three weeks promise to be particularly gruelling. At Christmas, we have the excitement of 25 December to look forward to and over the summer we usually manage a week away somewhere. But the Easter break stretches before me like a prison sentence. How on earth am I going to entertain the little rascals?

My usual solution is to organise a series of day trips - Kew Gardens one day, the London Eye the next - but the credit crunch has put paid to that. To give you just one example, the cost of spending a day at Legoland with my wife and four children would be £162 - and that's just the entrance tickets. Throw in petrol costs and a meal for six at Burger King and I wouldn't have much change left from £200.

So that just leaves the free attractions. Admittedly, Londoners are very well-blessed in that department but if I have to drag my kids around the Natural History Museum one more time I might end up bludgeoning myself to death with a dinosaur bone. The last time we went my four-year-old son was so terrified of the animatronic T-Rex he ran straight into a wall.

The fact that my other three children collapsed with laughter didn't help much. After that, he insisted on being carried for the remainder of the afternoon.

For better or worse, we'll be spending virtually the entire holiday period at home in Acton. I was keeping my fingers crossed for a cold snap but the gods have let me down, as they always do. The balmy weather means my children will insist I take them "camping", ie put a tent up in the garden and fill it with sleeping bags.

The chances of actually getting any sleep in it are vanishing-to-zero. Small children flip around at night like fish on a dry dock and anyone lying within 10 feet of them is at risk of being kicked in the head. Given the size of our tent, it's like trying to sleep in a bucket full of eels.

The one thing I will leave the house for is Wallace & Gromit's World of Cracking Ideas at the Science Museum. It's not cheap but the prospect of having my children's two favourite television characters introduce them to a succession of wacky inventions is too good to pass up.

It's probably a good idea to book tickets in advance. You don't have to be Nostradamus to know that this particularly attraction will be very popular.