Term time routine vs holiday habits

At the moment, we’re not really that impacted by school holidays, although N’s nursery school is only term time.  I tend to put him into his day nursery for the additional days so week days things generally carry on as normal.  But swimming is the one thing for us that changes.

We have swimming terms mostly in line with school terms (although sometimes lessons continue a bit longer in the summer) so we have occasional weeks off around school holiday times.  It feels like a real treat, but on the other hand it means I have to really make an effort to continue taking N swimming.

The odd week off doesn’t make much difference.  Sometimes it’s good to have a small break, especially once they get to toddlers as they’ve already got a lot of the basic kick, arm and breathing understanding in their memory.  Whether they’ll actually do the right movements on request is another matter (N and arms comes to mind).

But I’m lazy and it always seems such a chore to take N swimming outside of lessons.  Holiday times or weekends off mean more time to go exploring and find other things to do, catch up with friends, and go on day trips.

So term time routines are definitely best for us when it comes to swimming.  Without lessons, I’d have put off taking him regularly as the rest of life gets in the way, and I also don’t believe I’d have known where to start if I’d had to teach N to swim myself.  Especially with the water wobbles he went through as I’d have just given up and not wanted to upset him.  Having regular lessons with the confidence from the Water Babies teachers, meant he came through the other side and now loves it.

I think if you’re in a routine you continue going, but get out of the habit, and you need to get back into it or you lose the habit and then give up.

Every holiday (especially the longer ones), I say I’ll take N swimming aiming to go at the same time as his normal lessons.  And each holiday we might manage once or twice.  Now N’s getting older, he asks to go, so I’m not going to get away with being lazy any longer.

So the couple of weeks over Easter that our lessons aren’t on, I’m pledging to:

• look up the pool timetable
• pack the swim bags ready so there’s no excuse
• write times on the calendar…that’ll have to be Sunday mornings probably, so we’ll have time to go off and do other things afterwards
• tell N when we’re going as he’ll keep going on at me until we go

And then I’ll be looking forward to lessons starting again, so we can do our proper activities.  I always have a mind blank at the activities we do when we go swimming off our own back, so I really should make sure I write them all down.  Then there’s be no excuse.

What do you avoid doing during the holiday times?  Do you try and keep activities going once term time’s ended?

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Disclosure: We swim with and blog for Water Babies, but all topics, words and opinions are our own.