Mum's the word: A study in getting us all ready to slot back into the school routine

As let’s face it routines and schedules mostly go out the window during the summer months.

I can state this as a fact, this has been the fastest summer ever! I can’t believe that most schools are back to the classrooms this week. I honestly feel like it was the first week of July was just last week and here we are at the end of August.

Like so many families with young kids I am thinking of the week ahead and how to best prep for it.

Let’s face it, routines and schedules mostly go out the window during the summer months.

Bedtime has been a movable feature for the past number of weeks, diets have slipped a bit and most definitely screen time hasn’t been monitored as much has it should.

So for it not to be a total shock to our systems from the beginning of this week I have slowly kick started getting ready for bed a bit earlier each night. My daughter Joan hasalways been a night owl and not an early bird. So if we were in bed for 9-9:30 during the school term I was happy enough. But across the summer she has been falling asleep as late as 10:30 some nights so we need to adjust that for her.

Another thing is treats have been massively reduced. When we were in Canada for a few weeks at our cottage or staying with family, Joan would get a couple of treats like ice creams or freezies across the day.

I have stopped that this past week and started to get a proper lunch time going, as that seemed to be the meal the moved around the most. Sometimes we were eating at 11am or days at 2pm, but just with the school schedule coming back I want her to start getting use having lunch at a set time again.

This week, she has even taken her lunchbox out and packed it herself. She might take it off to her room to eat but at least we are thinking again about when kind of healthy lunches she wants packed for school.

I also feel in the summer months you can get a bit stuck in a rut with the kinds of foods we eat.

So this week I am back to pushing a bigger variety of foods. Mainly trying to get her to eat a few different kinds of fruits across the day, as she has always been good on the veggie front. Plus I want her to definitely have a great say in what she takes to school with her this year, mainly in order to ensure that she will actually eat it.

Next up on the to do list…. Screen time. I have talked about this before in my column but again like most families I think we all slack a bit on this front across the summer.

So for the past two weeks we are back to ensuring all tablets and phones are away for dinner time and we have reduced the amount of time she is allowed to be on it.

Instead the TV has gone on a bit more, thanks to crappy August weather.

But we find when the TV is on,instead of her tablet, she is more likely do something alongside, like paint, draw or play with lego.

Something else, which Joan suggested herself, is each day for the past week or so we have been pretending we are at school.

One day we might take out a geography book or the next do a science experiment.

Sometime I’m the teacher, other times, Joan is. Either way, I think it is a positive sign that she is ready to get back to her friends, the routine and back to learning.

It always takes a few weeks to get back into the full swing of things, but remember we are all in it together and I want to wish everyone good luck with going back to school.