How do best.manage school holidays?

[MerryGuide]

In reception so just starting to deal with holiday childcare as we've covered them so far.

For the longer holidays do you find its better to have a clear blocks of parents and paid care, so e.g. Easter 1 week of each?

Or better if its spread out per week, e.g 1 day with each parent, 1 with grandparents, 1 at holiday club long day, 1 at hobby club (shorter day)?

I guess summer will be the big one! So do you stick to set holiday clubs or do they get bored/repetitive? Is it worth sticking something like a week of tennis camp or similar in the mix.

Keen to hear how others make it work best with 2 x (almost) full time jobs.

Thanks all, its good to hear about the range of experiences. I think youre right it'll be the first year that'll be trickiest as we figure out what works.

Luckily we have lots of options locally, in including those covering full work days that take from age 4. Just not sure how long those sort of generic clubs work for, but I guess we try and see!

there is not a right or wrong way to do it. Summer holidays tended to be week blocks as the school after school club did a holiday club but only for the first 2 weeks of the school holidays. The kids would then go to MILs in Devon for a week and then the remainder was generally a week off all together and the rest a mix of me or DH taking a couple of days off or kids going to a friends (and we returned the favour on our days off).
Not really many other holiday clubs around here - leisure centre did a sports club but only school hours and my kids didnt like doing a whole day of sports!

Also once they are in school you might make friends enough with someone to do swop days. I did one with DDs best friend for a few years, maybe 5 days altogether each but took the pressure off.
but then her mum decided to just send her children to her mums for the whole summer anyway.

It depends what is available in your area and how that works for you.

I take 2 weeks AL and then a week of unpaid leave - our holidays are 5 weeks so just leaves 2 weeks to cover. Mine love clubs but not every day of the week so we do 1 day with grandparents, 2 days clubs, 1 day me and dh work a half day each and one day is my NWD. Ours works well for us, the only tricky bit is clubs as they dont all do the same ones so some days 3 different drop offs - luckily they're all local. If your child does a sport of some sort a lot of those hold holiday clubs so likely with some kids they know.

We always try to book clubs with friends - it makes it a lot nicer for the dc if they know someone there.

We mix up clubs as much as we can so it doesn’t get boring - at such a young age we rarely do a full week of any one club unless there’s a good hobby reason.

Once the kids get to about age 8 then we do longer bookings - near me there are clubs for baking, survival skills, Lego, drama, coding, science, watersports and every sport you can think of so it’s lots of fun.

Usually that works out fine until end of summer when a lot of holiday clubs tail off and in the last week there’s often nothing!