I’m not going candy coat anything here. Summer vacation is really a tough time for many special needs families, for a lot of reasons.
For starters, there’s the dreaded and utterly hated, change of routines. Can you say destabilizing?
Another concern is that now we have to feed them two meals that were previously getting at school. Hello maxed out grocery budget…
What about the obvious thing like, how to occupy their time? How do you entertain your child for the entire summer? Are you looking at any sort of camps, workshops or time with relatives?
These are all things that can be both fun for your child and educational.
There’s also the added advantage of helping with the final and arguably most important part of summer vacation…
How the frack do you keep from losing your mind?
I mean, we all love our kids, right? Right! That said, school made that so much easier because they were essentially a form of respite care, 5 days a week. Now what the heck are we supposed to do?
How are we supposed to survive the summer?
Let’s all share some ideas and help each other out.
Please leave your ideas, suggestions or future plans in the comments below. 🙂
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Another idea I had is would it be easier for the boys if you made some kind of schedule with actiities so that they would have some structure?
Does your state have a summer food program? Here in MA, if your child is eligible for the school lunch meals, they can also get free lunch during the summer at participating locations. I’m going to see how my son does with a few weeks of half day summer camp, I’m terrified he’ll wander off but really hoping it helps him socially. I love the library too, it’s free and air conditioned and my son loves the toys there… and we’ll try to spend time burning off energy at the playgrounds. Combining all of that and appointments and I have a feeling the summer will go by faster than I think!
Here are some ideas I came up with:
*Participating in your library’s summer reading program
* Free library activities for kids and the family
* Barnes and Noble has a summer reading program as well.
* Books-a-million also has a summer reading program
* Chuck E. Cheese has a summer reading program to earn 10 free tokens.
Art activities are always fun, especially open ended art activities. 🙂 There are tons of ideas on pinterest. Let the kids explore and paint with different objects such as race cars, string, straws, bubble wrap, q-tips, empty toilet paper rolls, lids and caps, etc.