Home from travels and holiday retrospect

Long silence owing to a three week trip around the UK.  It was exhausting, as it has been ever since we went from one child to two, but it was also tremendous fun.  We expected that our daughter, a notoriously bad sleeper, would be the problem, but in fact it was our son who struggled with the new surroundings and unfamiliar food.  Even though he'd been looking forward to the trip for weeks, the first night I sat at the top of my mother-in-law's stairs, cuddling him as he whimpered that he wanted to go home.

But it got better!  I'm still waiting to get to the point where I can actually recover from the jet-lag sleep deficit during the trip, but it could have been worse.  Despite some pre-trip phobia of public toilets, my daughter was an absolute star in maintaining her toilet training through all the travelling and different houses that we stayed in.  Both children watched far too much television, but we told ourselves was almost exclusively CBeebies and thus part of their cultural identity--and felt this rationale was validated when they took a shine to Postman Pat.

And, partly thanks to the best weather we've had for one of these trips, we had so much honest-to-goodness fun.

Anyway, our summer holiday is over, and next week my son does his orientation for his new school, with term for both children starting the following week.  It's been almost three months off school for the children, and this is the first time that I've worried about the academic lapse for my son.  Here in the States, it's an acknowledged problem that pupils forget a lot over the summer holidays, meaning a good proportion of the fall term is bringing them back up to speed.  Previously, that hasn't been an issue for us--not because I've had my son in summer school, but because he wasn't doing anything at school that we weren't practicing in daily life.

Now though, I look at where he is/was in his reading and writing and think that if he hadn't had that break, he would probably be really and truly reading by now.  I've been a bit hit and miss in practising that with him, because I don't want to push it and because he generally doesn't settle with me--preferring to mess around.  But late in the holiday I discovered that if I do push for some sit down and write time (we've actually been using a workbook--not at all Montessori, but it was at exactly the right level for him), he'll get his focus and surprise me with what he can do. 

During our trip, we had a tendency to go out in the morning and chill out in the afternoon.  When we were staying with friends with children, that wasn't a problem, but at the grandparents' houses the children would grow restless in the afternoon and become too chaotic.  We started doing sit-down activities with them: play doh, colouring--and the work-book (I also had an addition activity mat for my son and a counting one for my daughter, along with some beads for the maths side of things, though I never quite got these working smoothly).  This worked a treat, even though sitting down and arranging an activity for the children was frequently the last thing either of us wanted to do!

Next summer, I'll have to try and incorporate this into our daily routine: a 4pm work cycle, of sorts.  As it is, I'm at least satisfied that he hasn't slipped backwards from where his new school expects him to be--though I'm sure they expect a summer regression anyway!