What to do with kids in evening when on hols!?

[ThatBeachLyfe]

Want to book a holiday for early Sept once kids are back in school. I have a 1 and 3 year old. Love the look of some of the TUI Sensatori resorts but they don't have evening creches/babysitting options. So when the kids go to bed at 7pm what do people do? We used Mark Warner a couple years ago with DC1 and dropped him at the evening creche at 7pm where he fell asleep and we collected him at 10pm after we'd had dinner and drinks and this was lovely so we could have some adult time. Do families with young children just drag them to dinner and keep them awake a bit longer? Or is it a pipe dream to think we can have this kind of holiday with two small children. Do we all eat at 530 and spend the evening sat in the room/patio? Genuinely interested in other people's experiences..

We went to Greece and kept them on Uk time as mentioned above, so bedtime was 9/9.30pm. We generally did bath before dinner so they went to bed straight after dinner. Did mean they were pretty knackered at dinner time so buffet worked best at the toddler ages.

They still woke up on greek time though 🙄 6.30am despite blackouts. So we often found they needed a nap in the middle of the day even if not napping at home any more. A car ride was useful for this once they were older and more nap resistant.

Another option: look at Mousses, nothing like Sensatori but it offers childcare for these ages including two evenings per week.

Once mine dropped their naps, that was that, they wouldn't nap again, even if exhausted.

And they also get up 6-7am no matter what time they go to bed.

So we go for the compromise option of keeping them on UK time so they get to bed at 8pm European time and then we have a quiet glass of wine after they are asleep.

But we don't stay anywhere we have to be all in one room

We only do apartments now, DD won’t be left with strangers so clubs/babysitters won’t work. So we have an early dinner, put her to bed then have drinks and talk in the lounge (we are super busy so it’s nice to have a chance to have a catch up).

Thanks all for these tips! We'd only been to the Caribbean with DC1 before where the time difference is significant, so I hadn't considered the option for of just sticking to UK timezone and keeping them up until 9pm (7pm uk time). We're just back from a wonderful week in Cyprus and tbh I hadn't anticipated how exhausted we'd be at the end of the day, so after putting the kids to bed at 9ish we weren't too far behind them! Holidays with kids aren't really holidays are they... 😆