How to Cope with Bored Kids On Vacation

Having just returned yesterday from our annual vacation I learned the hard way of how to cope when your kids are having a boring holiday, our trip to Lloret De Mar proved to be a bit of a damp squid for the children and they wanted to come home after the second day, every day after that we had to try and find different ways to amuse them and keep their spirits up whilst tyring our best to make the most of the bad situation.

It was a difficult task but i think that the children would agree grudgingly that they did eventually have a good time. I think though if we had to spend another week there the whole family would be suicidal.

Coping with a bored family at home is a lot easier because you have a knowledge of your local area, you have toys and games to play or you could just sit down together and watch a good family movie on DVD, let the children play their computer games or play with their friends outside.

Coping when you are an alien in a foreign country is a different matter entirely although there are new places to visit new friends to make and play with children often need a helping hand to get the boredom out of their systems or they start to get on each others nerves and hitting out at each other which in turn makes you angry and stressed out which was your main reason for going away in the first place.

You could drink yourself into a stupor and forget about your kids for the night, but that just means that you will still have bored kids annoying you the next morning and a bad hangover to boot.

After a long boring day, the second day of our vacation, we decided to do some shopping to see if we could find anything that would help keep the kids amused during the rest of our stay in Lloret De Mar, we found some coloring in books, which had some scenes and landmarks of the area and coloring pens to match they cost around one Euro each to buy, whilst the kids were coloring in the books we set them a competition for the next day, to see who could find the most pictures from their books on a walk around the town, the kids really enjoyed exploring the town and it gave them an interest in their surroundings.

Mom and Dad became cool again, that passed almost a full day and the kids forgot all about their boredom as they screamed out every few minutes "That's in my book" each time they found one of the landmarks they won a piece of candy. I think there may have been a little cheating going on though because they claimed more points for seeing the same landmarks from different angles.

They managed between them to find all of the landmarks and sights in their books and all won the Grand Prize of one Euro each for doing so.

Whilst shopping we also Bought a couple of travel board games which helped us pass the time in the evenings after the childrens disco in the hotel was over.

Snakes and ladders Monopoly and Ludo I thankyou for the serenity you brought to my family on vacation, childrens puzzle books also helped to pass a few hours in the evenings.

The Spoken Language of Lloret De Mar is Spanish and to help pass some time and have some fun whilst learning a little we taught the children some basic spanish and asked them to try speaking with the local shop keepers.

"Hola" = Hello

"Buenos Días"= Good morning

"Buenos Tardes"= Good afternoon

"Buenos Noches" = Good night

we also taught them

"cómo está usted?"= How are you?

and how to answer it if they were asked

"soy bueno" = I am good

The children loved conversing with the locals in Spanish and if the conversation went further than the "I am good" stage the confusion on the kids faces said enough for them and the locals to have a good laugh.

The kids have asked since our return home if they could have some Spanish lessons.

We also played car colors with the children, we asked them to pick a color Robert picked blue, Jennifer picked green and Bryan picked red, then we told them to count cars with their color choice and the first one to see 10 cars of their color would be the winner, red seems to be the most popular color in Spain for cars as Bryan won the game nine out of ten times.