By Dineke · May 2026

How to plan the summer holidays (in May)

It's mid-May. The school year is, somehow, already two-thirds gone. Your phone keeps surfacing photos from Easter that feel like last week. There's a vague block on the calendar called “summer holidays” that starts in mid-July, and underneath it sits six weeks of nothing — six weeks where the school day stops, the after-school clubs stop, and the routine that quietly held the family up since September just isn't there.

If you've ever got to the first Friday of the summer holidays and realised neither of you booked the right week off, neither of you signed up for the holiday club in time, and neither of you actually asked your mum about that Tuesday — this post is for you. The most-together families I know all do something similar: they treat May as the month when the summer gets planned, not July.

Six weeks of school-free time is a planning project. The honest version of “we'll figure it out closer to the time” is “one of us will figure it out closer to the time, alone, late at night, with whatever's left over.” If that's worked for you so far, brilliant. If it hasn't, here's what we see working.

1. Carve up the leave first

Most working parents have somewhere between four and five weeks of annual leave. The school summer holidays are six. The maths is unkind, but it's also the maths everyone is working with — and the only way it adds up is if you've actually had the conversation. Whose week is week one. Who takes the last fortnight. Where the gap is, and who is covering it.

It's a much better conversation in May, with both work calendars open and HR's leave system still flexible, than in early July when you've quietly assumed your partner was taking that week and they've quietly assumed the same of you.

The other reason to do it now: the rest of this post depends on it. Until you know which weeks are “us” and which weeks aren't, you can't book the clubs, you can't ask the grandparents, and you can't really tell the kids anything.

2. Book the holiday clubs before half-term

The good ones go quickly. By the time half-term arrives at the end of May, the local sports camp's first two weeks are full, the council scheme has a waitlist, and the small specialist things — the climbing centre's morning sessions, the theatre group, the coding camp — went weeks ago. By the second week of July, you're booking what's left, not what's right.

The list of options is also surprisingly hard to assemble. It's scattered across last term's school newsletters, a WhatsApp group from football, a leaflet that came home in a book bag, a council webpage that nobody can find twice. Somewhere in mid-May, sit down with that pile, decide which week each child is doing which thing, and book before half-term week.

(If gathering the pile is the bit that defeats you — the forty different formats, the PDFs, the screenshots, the forwarded emails — that's exactly the job we wrote about handing to AI. It's the fiddly, recoverable, high-volume kind of work it's actually good at.)

3. Ask the grandparents specifically, not vaguely

“Could you help with the kids over the summer?” is a hard question to answer. “Could you have them on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the second week of August?” is one your mum can actually say yes or no to.

Vague asks bounce around for weeks, which is fine in May and disastrous in July. Specific asks resolve in a single message. Grandparents have lives — book club, that thing on Tuesdays, a friend they've been meaning to visit — and they need the same notice your partner does. The earlier you ask, the more likely the answer is yes.

4. Have the conversation with the kids

Not “what do you want to do in the summer” — that produces “I don't know” or “go to America.” Useful versions: “would you rather do football camp or the art week,” “do you want a sleepover with cousin X in July or in August,” “is there anything you specifically want to do that you haven't done before.”

Some of it you'll plan around. Some of it you'll just learn things from — older kids in particular often want a lot less organised than parents reflexively book. Either way, the conversation is easier in May, while the year still feels open, than in the second week of July when school's panic-finishing and everyone's wired.

5. Get all of it onto one view

Carved-up leave, holiday clubs, grandparent days, the actual holiday if you're going away, the friend's wedding in week three, the orthodontist appointment that has to happen sometime — by the time you've assembled the summer it's a surprisingly dense calendar, and if it lives in two heads, it'll fall over.

On to a single shared view. Colour-code by child, by parent, whatever — but one surface, visible to both adults, before half-term. The Sunday-evening reset in July is then “what's actually happening this week” rather than “let's figure out the next six.”

And put a name on each thing. The Wednesday club drop-off in week two has to belong to someone — not to “us,” which in practice means whoever notices first. Awareness isn't the same as covered, and six weeks is a long time to be the person quietly covering things by default.

Where we sit

We build parte., our AI family assistant, and we built it for exactly this kind of week in the year — when the household runs at its highest concurrency and its lowest tolerance for a missed pickup. One shared view, colour-coded per person. A wall-display mode for the kitchen iPad, so the week is just there when someone reaches for a mug. An AI intake that turns the holiday-club confirmation email into events, the council scheme PDF into events, the school's last-day letter into events — without anyone retyping anything. An owner on every event, so the Tuesday in August has a name next to it before August.

None of this turns six weeks of school-free time into less than six weeks. It just stops the planning of it from happening at 11pm, in one person's head.