Exit through the gift shop

Like rings in a tree, your life will be marked with special events. Your first day at big school, a stolen kiss behind the bike sheds and learning the inadvisability of drinking luke warm Cinzano (possibly all in the same week) amongst some of the most memorable.

Much later, adulthood will have brought your children's first steps - and as you watched them grow, a realisation that the size of your bank balance and choices of where to go on holiday would now inexorably shrink. Grasping the reality of your reduced circumstances - and the little darlings' determination to have as much fun as can be crammed into a three day vacance - like it or not, you're going to visit a theme park.
Happily, you live in France, which has a rather more genteel approach to the genre than elsewhere. Not for nos amis feral hordes of baseball cap and shell suit garbed teenagers, prowling the grounds of a once proud stately home, intent only on voiding their recently eaten burgers whilst plummeting to earth aboard some Descent to Hell rollercoaster thingy. Oh no. Despite the branding, even Disneyland Paris retains a frisson of civility, staffed as it is by helpful lycee dropouts keen to practice their Anglais – and to explain the hidden workings of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. And managing an insouciance matched only by the park's waiters, the chained dragon under Sleeping Beauty's castle still scares the hell out of your average 3 year old. Elsewhere there's a happy disregard for enforced jollity, and the scant regard of minimum height requirements for the more bowel rattling rides allows your petites to get over their dragon induced trauma by focusing instead on survival. In short, fun.
As is Futuroscope. Built on the outskirts of Poitiers (presumably so the city is remembered for something than the French army getting whopped by les rosbifs in 1356), the park is a delightful mix of the old fashioned (log plumes and boats with water guns attached), educational and 21st century, wrap around 4D oh-my-God rides. There's an assumption that its visitors have 3 figure IQ's, the food is freshly cooked and comes on plates rather than in polystyrene boxes, and the magic and night time light shows live up to their billing. And as you leave, the turnstile staff will even smile and thank you for coming. Try getting that at Alton Towers. Vive la différence.