In about a month, my husband and I will be taking our sons on our annual vacation to Cape Cod. My dad has a time – share week there, and we go there to stay with him. Last year and the year before that, we had a great time vacationing with Dylan. This year will be the first time that Blake goes to Cape Cod.
While I am not worried about our vacation, I do want to prepare myself (and my husband) for our first lengthy excursion with a two and a half year old and a baby who will be five months old when we make the trip. I would like to do as much as I can to make sure that the trip is relaxing and enjoyable for everyone, including myself. Here are a few things that I plan to do in order to prepare our family for our vacation.
Preparing Dylan for the trip is an interesting process because whenever I mention that we are going to see PaPa Jim at the beach for a week, he asks if as can go and see PaPa Jim “right now”. Dylan sure does love his PaPa Jim. Anyways, I have worked a couple of beach – themed books into our nightly story time. Dylan enjoys looking at the pictures of the beach, especially pictures of children building sand castles. I have a feeling that it may be a good idea to pick up some sand toys for our trip because that really seems interesting to him. I have also been showing him pictures from last year, to refresh his memory of some of the places that we visited.
Travel logistics can be interesting when young children are involved. It is about a five hour drive from here to there, so we will definitely try to make it as easy as we can for the kids. Last year, we had fairly good luck with beginning our trip close to Dylan’s bed time. We will do the same thing this year, as both of us don’t mind driving at night and we feel that the children are probably more comfortable that way.
Although we do not have a very rigid schedule at our house, Dylan has recently started going to bed and waking up at fairly regular times. Our meals are eaten at about the same times each day, too. To help keep everyone on an even keel, we will stick to the routine as much as possible. I also plan to keep scheduled activities to a minimum, and to do only one “big” thing each day to provide plenty of time for unstructured exploration and play as well as rest and relaxation. Finally, I plan to implement another lesson that I have learned – setting age appropriate expectations for both children. We may not hit all of our favorite restaurants if the lines are long, but we may discover other ways to enjoy good food in a way that accommodates everyone.
Photo by jennifererix on morguefile.com.