help curbing the exhaustion
for dd, not for me :-)
dd just started kindergarten this month. she goes 3 full days and 2 half days. 3 days/week she also goes to the afterschool program and on the other 2 days/week, I'm home. Anyway, she is so completely exhausted by the time she gets home. It seems to take all she has just to keep it together and she's having at least one, sometimes many, total melt-downs before finally going to bed. She sleeps from about 8 pm to 7 am or so (sometimes earlier, not usually later). I've tried getting her to bed before 8 but it's hard, esp. on the days that I'm working.
I obv. can understand that she's busy and tired, but I guess I was expecting she would have adjusted some by now. Should I expect this for the whole year?
(she went to daycare/preschool full days before this, but often fell asleep during rest time. She no longer has rest time)
Re: help curbing the exhaustion
I have a good friend whose daughter took a 30 to 45 min nap in the afternoon after kindergarten. My friend didn't force her to take a nap, she just encouraged her to chill out and watch a video for a while after school, while Mom helped older sister out with homework and got dinner going. The kindergartener would often fall asleep in front of the tv. My friend didn't feel that was necessarily the best solution, so she tried to get her to take a nap in bed. But her daughter refused to because she "wasn't a baby anymore!"
So my friend figured the lesser of 2 evils was to let her konk out in front of the tv and get the rest she needed.
FWIW, my son gave up naps over 2 years ago, and he is also struggling not to feel exhausted by full day kindergarten. By the end of the week, I can tell he's dragging. It gets harder and harder to get him up in the morning. It's better now than it was in the 2nd week of school, but he's still adjusting.
It will get better. K in my area is full day all week so by the end of the week they are a cranky mess. With DD#1 it got better in the late fall. She wouldn't be as cranky and it gradually got better. She did end up taking a nap occasionally on the weekends. She had not been napping for a while but really needed it.
DD#2 started K this year and she's taken a random Sunday afternoon nap a few times since school started.
This. I remember when my daughter started K and it was full days all week. She was falling asleep at 6:30 and sleeping thru the night for a while. She eventually adjusted but they had a rest time during the day. I'm surprised your schoold doesn't offer that.
Good luck.