Monday, July 11, 2011

What you'll do on your Summer Vacation

If you are lucky enough to have a vacation scheduled this summer, here are some things to remember when you take your Little Darlings along.  If you have figured out how to have a vacation without dragging the LD's with you, please let us know.

If your child's sleep schedule changes while you are on vacation (whether it's a time zone change or a later bedtime or addition of naps on the beach or any other change), you will pay for it when you get back home.  So, don't expect your child to automatically resume a pre-vacation bedtime routine just because you have to go to work on Monday.  No, no, no.

If, for example, you allowed those cherubs to stay up late and, in turn, sleep in late, you will need to reestablish the routine sleep schedule when you return home.  Bad news here: it may take a week or two of gradually moving the clock back and it will depend on just how lenient you were while on vacation.  If your kiddos usually go to bed by, say, 9PM with a wake-up time of 7AM and, during your week at the Cape, they stayed up until 11:30 and then slept until 9AM, you need to move the whole schedule back two hours.  This will not go over well and you should not try to do it all at once.  However, allowing them to stay up and then yanking them out of bed to go off to camp or child care at the usual early rising time will backfire on both of you in a big way.

The best thing to do is to avoid changing the usual sleep-wake times by too much while you are on vacation.  The less change there is, the easier it will be to get the critters back on routine when you get home.  Which we know may be easier said than done.

Just keep in mind that if you get home from a week away only to find that your kids are miserable and even more disagreeable than usual, you may want to check on the bedtimes.

And don't forget the sunscreen!

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