We just arrived home from our week long vacation. We’re still settling in and getting back into our routine, but I wanted to share how Little T survived the 14+ hours we spent traveling in our car.

I’d spent a long time searching for strategies and suggestions online. I found a few good ideas, like the Car Ride Bingo, but most of them I just recycled from my days teaching kindergarten. I hope this helps for any soon to be tiny travelers~

The first thing I did, was grab a bunch of big envelopes from the garage. These are pretty cheap to purchase if you don’t have any on hand. Toddlers have short attention spans, so I made ten envelopes filled with different games, then stored them all in this Sprouts bag so I could easily grab a folder during the car ride. I know it isn’t pretty, but I’m busy and wanted them to be functional and easy, so I used a giant sharpee and wrote the names of the games in big letters on the top of the envelope. This made it easy breezy to sort through them.

Each envelope had a different activity that were a mix of things for different moods and temperaments. If he was calm, we’d read him a book, if he was hyper we’d pull out the manipulatives, etc. Here’s the game list:

1. Car Bingo
2. Doctor
3. Magazine game
4. Books
5. New Movie (5$ Elmo alphabet movie from Target)
6. Find the colors
7. Guess the letter
8. Manipulatives
9. Map

And here’s a run down of the games:

Group Games:

1. Car Bingo:make a bingo sheet and search for the cars you see on the road.

2. Guess the letter: Write the letters A, B, and C on flash cards. Fold them in half and place them in the envelope. When it’s time to play, pull a folded card out of the envelope and have everyone guess which letter it is. The person who is right, wins.

Keep those hands busy games:

1. Find the color: twist up a bunch of colored pipe cleaners. Give it to them, and ask them to give you a certain color. They will tune up their fine motor skills as the have to twist and turn the pipe cleaners to get the right color out.

Manipulatives:
We’ve been collecting cheap little things to keep his hands busy in the car. We have to supervise when he plays with these, but Little T loves it when we pull one out. In our bag we have bubble wrap for him to pop (need adult next to him for this), a twisty man, a little fan, a squishy baseball, party blowers, bird whistle, a rhino balloon, harmonica, and a few other things for him to play with.

More Mellow Activities:

1) Doctor: I grabbed some coloring pages and told Little T that we were going to play doctor. We had him clean off Belle with a dry towel or tissue, then pretend to put medicine on her with a q-tip, then put on a band aide. This was one of his favorite games.

2) Magazine: Use a kids magazine and go through it ahead of time. Make a list of things for your toddler to find as they go through the magazine. Tell them what they need to find, and once they have found it move on to the next object. To simplify this, I wrote the list on the folder with a sharpee.

Map: Print out a google road map with directions to where you are going. Circle towns that you will go through, and mark it with stickers as you pass through the town. I taped the map to the outside of the folder.

When you need a break:

1) New Movie: we have a DVD player that we use for wind down and quiet time. Purchase a 5$ movie or borrow one from a friend. We bought Elmo’s alphabet jungle. We also have a few favorites on hand, but this was a nice short movie to pull out and surprise him with.

2) A New Book: We mingled a few new 1$ books we found, along with some of his favorites. I bought some really simple books and read him the story, then I had him “read” the story back to me. We also just let him look through the books.

The other thing we did was pack a travel snack box. When he was hungry, he loved being able to choose what he wanted from this box. We threw in Kind Bars, apple sauce, oranges, instant oatmeal (we stop and get hot water from the gas station to make this when we travel) apple juice, and fruit bars.

I think the most important thing to remember is that kids have short attention spans. Little T loved all these games, but we switched around a lot. We also adapted the games a to make them a little different on the way back. Overall though, they were a really big success and didn’t take up a lot of space in the car. He started asking to play games first thing when we got in the car, so I think he really enjoyed it. We’re going to keep some in the car for good.

Happy car traveling friends. Let me know if you have any travel ideas that you think Little T would also like. We’re taking another long trip this summer and have a plane (ack) trip coming up. Definitely open to ideas. 🙂

Things have been moving full speed ahead in our household, with more time spent away than at home. Our little family is just hanging on and enjoying the ride. 🙂

Last week I had to stay at the Grand Californian (after trying to check into the wrong hotel-haha), while I photographed a few events over the course of a couple of days. Little T, Grandma K, and Big T met up with me on Friday night. On Saturday morning, Little T woke up and was amazed that the moon had disappeared from the window (we had the blinds open). He was moon gazing all night, sweet baby boy.

After we woke up, we went to Disneyland for a little bit. Little T met all of the princesses at the new Fantasy Faire, and was quite the little charmer. He’s learned that the ladies really enjoy it when he blows them kisses, and had a blast telling Cinderella and Snow White about every single cut, bruise, and scrape he’d ever gotten, and then threw in that he really really loved basketball.

He didn’t know who Princess Aurora was, so he told her all about how he’d just met Snow White and Cinderella, while probably wondering why this Aurora lady was dressed up so fancy.

After we met with the princesses, we had to change hotels and move to the Disneyland Hotel. Big T and I photographed an awesome wedding that night until about 1:30 in the morning, but this didn’t stop Little T from waking us up at 7:00. 😉

We went swimming in the pool for a while, then drove over to San Diego for Baby N’s birthday party. By this time, I was too exhausted to lift a finger and couldn’t take any more photos!

Last week, I got to be a part of an art show in Pomona that features local artists. When we got there, my display kind of fell apart, ack!

Big T and I were the oldest people there, and my photography was by far the most cheerful. We decided that in order to fit in, next time we’ll need to take angsty pictures of parenthood like dramatic photos of Big T at 6 in the morning with Little T jumping on the bed trying to wake him up. Holy moly, we’re getting old. I may or may not have needed a glass of wine the size of my head to get through the night. 😉

On Friday we drove up to Fresno. I was amused that Big T’s head was cut out of this picture, and told him I was going to make it my Facebook profile, heh heh. We celebrated my mom’s birthday, and had the hardest time fitting all those candles on her cake. 😉

We took Little T to the park and played for a while:

I can’t decide, is it lazier to not use your arms and bend over to get a drink, or to do it the usual way?

On Sunday, we went to celebrate the life of my late step sister at her memorial service. There were so many people there, which just goes to show how so very loved she was. Here’s Little T with his cousins after the memorial.

We’ve mastered the art of a four hour drive with a two year old, and came up with this sticker reward chart. Every time he is good and gets to certain places on the map, he gets a Cars sticker. If he gets all the stickers, he gets a lollipop. This kid is super motivated by lollipops.

In one week, going to two birthdays, two weddings, and a memorial service made me realize how important our family is. They’re the ones who get us through life. The good times, the hard times, and the bad times. So I’ll end this post with a quote that I love,

“Family, we may not have it all together-but together we have it all”.