Preparing For a Peace-Filled Summer (As a special needs mom)

Our summers were really awful for a good four years out of the last five years. 

One, because our daughter with PANDAS was not in a structured school environment. 

And two, it was, there was only one of me, and I had a toddler at the time and it was just extremely stressful, unpleasant, and unenjoyable. 

So I know where you're coming from. That stress starting to bubble up and maybe it’s mingled in with a little bit of joy, but mostly dread… lets talk about it.

I wanted to share with you some strategies and tips on really preparing for a peace- filled summer. And that does require that we do some reverse engineering. 

We really do have to reverse engineer our problem if we want to find a solution. And what that means is we have to start with:

Identify Your Goals

Take a minute, pull out your notepad and quickly write down the answers:

• What are our goals? 

• How do we want to feel this summer? 

• How do we want our children to feel this summer? 

• Do we want to feel relaxed and kind of like going at the pace of each day?

Or do you prefer to function by having everything scheduled out and that feels better for you? 

Each of us are wired a little bit differently and your core values might even be different than mine.  But when we begin to identify what our goals actually are, how we want to feel, how we want our children to feel,  then we can start to kind of make a, I call it a very loose plan because I need to have loose plans to feel good about my day and my structure, especially as a working mom.

For me, I want my home to feel peaceful.  I want there to be flexibility and fun. I want for there to be a cohesiveness about it, especially because for us, we've come out of five years of some pretty significant trauma as a family, walking through. 

And I talk about that more, in depth in the book Wrapped in Kindness. 

I'm not talking about the goals of what you want to do. I'm talking about the goals of how you want to feel. Because so many of us, we have this outline goal like “"I want to go on X number of camping trips, and I want to take my kids to Disneyland, and I want to put them in swim lessons, and I want to do this”, but we're not actually looking at how do we want to feel through that, and then we set ourselves up for failure.

• Do I have the emotional capacity to do all of those things? 

• Do my children have the emotional capacity to do all of those things?

So looking at your goals through a different lens of “how do I want to feel as I move throughout all of these different moving pieces of the summer” is really important. 

For me as a mom who works from home and who works at a clinic outside the home,  I'm also taking into account what my other responsibilities are. 

What Are Your Sticky Points?

These are the areas that bring up immediate frustration when you go to make your plans and they always come up as we are about to make our goals. 

For example,  If your goal is to have a peaceful summer and your children are nagging you about snacks every five minutes, you're gonna lose your peace. You're gonna be frustrated. You're going to want to run outside and just start, you know, ripping weeds out of your garden.

You're gonna be doing other things instead of to avoid that frustrating situation. 

So, what are the areas that, as you assess the needs of your home, are your sticking points? For me, it's the constant demands for snacks.

I can't deal. And primarily because I have to make everything from scratch most of the time.

Snacks need to be ready to go. Something I don't have to cook or prepare. And if it requires that I have to cook or prepare it between breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it's not going to happen. and if my kids start demanding that, it does lead to frustration in me.

So, if that's a sticky points for you, or if sibling fighting is a sticky point for you, then we need to come up with a plan to mitigate the stress around those sticky points. 

1. Make a snack station: I load that up with easy to grab snacks like apples, bananas, like a little tub of berries,  maybe a thing of applesauce, jerky, cheese sticks. there's so much that you could do within that.

Then that's what they get for the day. If they want something outside of what I've prepared for them, then they are welcome to grab that. I don't restrict food for my children, by the way. that's not what I'm advocating for. What I'm advocating for is the constant barrage of “please give me a snack, please get me food”.

Aint nobody got time for that! 

I use these trays and set them on the table for the day. They can decide how and when they want to utilize those snacks. It’s a win win!

This is another snack station that I love for day trips or outdoor play.

Eventually I will have them help me load them up, but to start with, make it easy on everyone.

Is This A Skill-Building Time, or a Skill Mastered Time?

Now, because we have not been in a strict routine of that throughout the school year, I have to begin to think about the summer as a skill- building time, not a skill mastered time, meaning I cannot go into the summer expecting a mastered skill that she has not mastered. And this is true for all children. 

If we have not already taught them how to master that particular behavior, we want to make sure that we're not going into the summer expecting a skill mastered. We need  to be able to assess where our children are at.