Holiday Book

We've booked our first family holiday for September of this year and I'm so very excited about it! It's Bee's gift for her 5th birthday and we're off to Peppa Pig World in Hampshire! It's in the New Forest, right down near the south coast and we're staying at Hoburne Bashley Holiday Park. 

We're only planning one day at Peppa Pig World (unless Bee really loves it) and have 4 other days to fill with fun and adventure. We're thinking maybe a car ferry over to the Isle of Wight or a visit to Beaulieu Motor Museum in honour of Bee's obsession with buses and trains, exploring the New Forest, maybe an animal park or farm, the seaside... there's going to be lots to do.

Since booking I've been worrying about how Bee would cope with the holiday. How do you explain to a 4-year-old with learning difficulties that you're staying away from home for a few days in a big box on legs? Or that for a few days she'll have to cope with a complete change to her normal routines? Bee always copes best with change when she's had some preparation so I decided to tell her about the holiday early. Of course the unforeseen problem with this has been balancing preparing Bee with her complete lack of understanding about things happening in the future. She's very excited about Peppa Pig World and asks me most mornings if we're going. Thankfully when I say "not today" the worst I get is a few whys? before she moves on!

To help with the preparation I thought some pictures would help so I emailed Hoburne Bashley and asked for a brochure that we could sit and look through together. Unfortunately when it arrived there were not many 'useable' pictures, just lots of information. I cut out the few I could use and got searching on Google images for generic pictures I could use to complement the few I had.

There was a lot of information I wanted to include about our holiday so there were two pages about where we would be staying, a page for Peppa Pig World, a couple of pages for activities we might do and a page for out trip on the way home.

Bee has loved sitting and sharing the book and I've found it a really helpful tool for talking about our holiday together.