Cine Kids - Surviving The Summer Holidays Without Too Much Screen Time
Hello Summer Holidays!
As a parent, you probably understand that holidays, especially the long summer holidays, can cause your child to get bored easily. It's not that big of a deal if you have a great house with a vast garden filled with a pool, trampoline, tree hut, climbing rack, or grass where they can play ball or water games. Letting your child in the garden, even if it's communal is a great help when parents need to work during the day.
Sadly, we don't have this luxury even though I tried really hard to find a new apartment before summer started so that we were guaranteed an easier summer in terms of keeping our daughter occupied. If something doesn't work out as you hoped, it's time to set plan B into motion and that's what I did. I accepted the fact that this was not going to work out in time before summer and started thinking about other ways to get through the summer without her getting bored often and us getting stressed while having to work.
The easiest thing to do is say yes when your kid is bored and asks to watch tv/tablet or any other screen. But we all know this will become a very long and exhausting summer if you allow your child to sit behind the screen all day. Let's see how we can avoid this from happening by properly planning the holidays.
I will tell you what I did in the paragraphs below and hope it helps you plan your summer holiday ahead as well.
Summer school/summer camp
The first thing I did was look for summer camp options. Not the ones with sleepovers though, as I'm not at that phase yet where I'd trust complete strangers to look after my child during the night. She's too young for that in my personal opinion so I went online and started researching options for day camps.
It was not an easy task as here in Spain, many businesses don't update things online, so a lot of info was outdated or not in our area. But I managed to find a few options that we seriously considered.
One of them was registering her for summer swimming classes, which would have been an intense two-week daily course (one hour a day though) and then she'd start the summer all fresh with (hopefully) a swimming diploma. I tried signing her up for this but got the confirmation that this was last year's form and the new one would not be online for another few weeks.
Meanwhile, I found an English summer school from the British private school in our area which was confirmed to be a great place filled with fun activities such as crafting and swimming in the school's own pool. Our friend works there and she said it's a really fun (but expensive) summer school.
The school had the option of the morning until 1 pm or lunch until 4. I would have loved for her to be there every day until 4 but with her eating habits it was way too expensive to pay another 300 euros for this option knowing that she'd come home and not eat anything in case there was nothing to her liking.
They had the option for a two-week course or a full month, which we both considered, we ended up signing her up for the full month, mornings only. It's almost 500 euros but at least this will ensure her having the mornings filled with fun stuff, and give me space to work during the mornings while I can let go of work in the afternoons to keep her busy. In the end, if you do the maths it's not even that expensive per hour so I'm happy we signed her up.
Make a list of possible day trips
In our case, the summer holidays last for 3 months, yes 12 long weeks and we will not have a two-week vacation to a resort during these months as I feel we can also manage with day trips as we have wheels to explore other areas as well.
What I started to do a few months ago is list every possible day trip activity that I found during the past months. Once I had a big list, I started to divide them into categories to filter out the things not suitable for the months of July and August because of the extreme heat.
Next, I started exploring the things most suitable during the first 1,5 weeks before the summer school starts and make a daily planner for this period. This week will probably be the most expensive week along with the last few weeks in early September because then the heat is not as bad as the period in between.
Finally, you have a list of other trips you can divide over the remaining weeks. What you can do is change things along the way, swap trips accordingly when the weather is not ideal or when you spontaneously did something else that day. I promise you that having all these options written down will make your weeks so much easier, especially if you're busy with work on other days and don't feel like constantly having to search the web for ideas.
Plan ahead
That brings me to my final point, planning ahead works like magic. Nothing is set in stone though, you can have an online sheet so things can easily be copied and pasted to other days when the planning changes.
It's not needed to fully plan the summer ahead, obliviously. If you start with 1 or 2 weeks and then remove items from these weeks which you didn't end up doing, moving them forward, you will see that within no time you have tons of options and probably end up with more ideas than you can execute in the whole summer.
That's all for this week
I hope I gave you enough ideas to survive the summer without too much screen time and enough options to make memories as a family instead. I know I'm very glad I started prepping this summer early on as I didn't really look forward to these hot months thanks to a proper lack of planning and transportation last year.
This week, I'm confident, will be much more fun and relaxed. I hope the same goes for you!
Have a great week ahead, see you next week!
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