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Preparation for holiday

ParentingAutism

We are going on holiday in April at the beginning of the half term. Our children will have Friday off (meant to be the last day of term) so we can travel. My eldest, on the spectrum, took a while to come to terms with this but she's now very excited about the holiday. We are going away for 7 nights. 

We are trying to stick to routine as well as we can. We will be travelling in the car for 4 hours. We will be taking stops and breaks and we will also have a dog. We are sorting out a social story for all the children. They have looked at where we are staying and what the caravan will look like and things to do. 

Car journeys are very stressful especially with 3 children. There's a lot to think about and do. How do we make this as easy and fun as we can? How do you deal with holidays? 

  • in reply to Lau

    I know the hardest part of holidays are the transition to and after. Once she's settled, she loves it, but when it is time to leave she starts to struggle. 

    Luckily we have school on our side. They are helping us prepare her for the changes. They are also giving her some comfort items to take from school to the holiday. 

  • Each time we have went on holiday, I show actual pictures of the location we are going, restaurants we would be visiting, swimming pools, entertainment room, the caravan and the beach. I say things like wow we will be splashing and cooling off in the pool etc.

     My two have always coped pretty well going on holiday. The only time they struggled was with the loudness of the entertainment at night but ear defenders helped my youngest and both boys also had earphones that linked to their iPads to watch YouTube/play games etc.

    I also didn’t make the holiday overly busy we would do one activity per day and eat out once per day so we spent lots of time regulating after the activities by chilling in the caravan on devices, playing with toys, playing dominoes and snap.

    We also got a food shop delivery to our caravan so I knew my kids would have the food they like and lots of snacks and treats. 

    Then the dreaded day the holiday was over my youngest really struggled with it being over he didn’t want to leave so he was very upset.