I Survived Winter Break With Little Kids
Hopefully you did, too
For days, we didn’t bother picking up the mess from Christmas. Toys piled on top of each other like sediment covering calcifying dinosaur fossils. Pokemon on top of Barbie clothes on top of Frozen underwear on top of a half-eaten chocolate Santa, stuck to the rug with a shred of Bluey wrapping paper and a piece of Scotch tape covered in brown shedded pine needles. We lived like this for days, surviving on meals of Trader Joe’s snacks from our stockings and days-old cinnamon rolls.
Family came and went. Or maybe we went there? We dressed and undressed and forgot the days of the week. Was it morning or evening, my children would ask. Like the early days of post-partum, I had no idea, I could only guess by trying to carbon date the apple rinds left on the couch. The bite marks looked fresh. It must be morning.
Personally, I love winter break, says the most annoying person you’ve ever encountered on social media. Someone whose avatar includes a photo of themselves sitting in some sort of wheat field and holding a toddler wearing wheat colored clothes, probably. Because I actually like my kids. I like my kids, too, but here is a list of things I don’t like that also happen to occur over winter break:
-It’s winter, and therefore cold and therefore the majority of our activities must take place indoors. The other option is outdoors in the cold but I will be miserable, the kids will be miserable and everyone will say they want hot chocolate but when we get hot chocolate that costs $7 a cup, everyone under six will remember they actually do not like nor know how to properly drink hot chocolate without burning the crap out of their tongue.
-It’s too long. Two weeks of no routine is too much! My kids love school. I like my job. We all like doing the same things every day! It’s comforting, it’s organized, and it keeps everyone’s bowel movements pretty much predictable from eating a reasonable amount of cookies. But during winter break, all bets are off. We might wake up at 6am and watch TV for four hours or we might wake up at 8am and immediately demand to play in the outdoor sandbox in 27-degree weather. We might drive to Baltimore on a whim because why not, there are still seven days left to fill. We likely have no clean laundry for some reason I can’t really explain, but it’s probably related.
-There’s a lot of family time. Not just our little nuclear family, but extended family, too. And while I love that my kids get to see their grandparents and aunts and uncles, it’s so much excitement and people who don’t know their culture. People who mean well but think that, like, you can just peel them a banana and hand it to them and they’ll eat it without any repercussions. People who think simply offering them a vegetable will result in them eating a vegetable. People who cannot pronounce the Pokemon “Vaporeon” correctly and cannot understand what thehell the 2 year old is saying when she repeatedly yells “VAPOREON!!!!!”
-Too many toys with too many pieces and somehow someone always has better toys than someone else and two days later someone is complaining they didn’t get enough toys even though I don’t know where we are even going to put all these new toys. I know this one is my fault, but just putting this in here so next year I remember not to buy them so many fucking toys.
Winter Break should be a time of rest and relaxation, a time of family togetherness. And I think it will be, one day, when my kids can read a book to themselves or make their own snack, or at least poop without needing assistance. But for now it is mostly two weeks of parental servitude: changing diapers, reading Minnie Mouse’s Mysteries three excruciating times in a row (It was the goat that ate the daffodils, Minnie! THE GOAT!), peeling and pulling apart a baker’s dozen of clementines a day, and changing the show from Wild Kratts to the Wild Kratt’s Movie: Activate Kid Power until me or my husband has a small mental breakdown after eating our seventh Peppermint Jojo instead of lunch and yells “THAT'S IT, EVERYONE IN THE CAR” and we whisk everyone off to a children’s museum to get the flu.
The days are long, but the years are short, they say. Well, winter break is the longest period of time ever recorded in human history. An epoch. But I am grateful. I know one day I will look back on the Christmases when my kids were little, when getting a Barbie Dream House or even just a new flashlight made them jump up and down and squeal with excitement. I know one day I’ll miss staying up until midnight playing Santa with my husband, even though I’m exhausted, taking bites of the reindeer’s carrots, and trying to remember whose presents I wrapped in the green tissue paper. And as parents of young children, I think we are all just trying to survive it and we are doing our best. The Christmas mornings are so, so short. I can already feel them slipping by. It brings a tear to my eye. No, wait, that’s my nose running. Shit, I think I have the flu.
My kids are 8, 6, and 4, so can entertain themselves, the oldest can read, etc., and we got tons of snow so winter break was fun. I disliked how cold and long it was in Boston, but it's way better when your kids are old enough to go sledding and ice skating and visit museums without putting stuff in their mouths.
Absolutely nailed it with the timing observation about how winter break stretches into this bizarre epoch where normal time rules don't apply. The part about carbon dating apple rinds to figure out if it's morning hits diffrently when you've been in that postpartum-like fog of endless snack requests and routine collapse. I dunno if anyone talks enough about how the lack of structure affects not just behavior but like, basic biological functions in little kids. The predictablity of school routines does way more heavy lifting than we realize until it's gone for two weeks.