The other day I was showing Little T old blog posts from here, and it made me remember how important it is to keep this little blog going, to help me remember the good days that I never want to forget.

So! I wanted to quickly write about our friends visiting from Vermont. We met ages ago over a mutual love of Harry Potter, and haven’t seen each other for five years. I was so incredibly happy to see them again when they came to visit this month, but next time, everyone had better get over here. LoIKIA’s, I’m looking at you! 😉

We had a busy two weeks, that included photoshoots:

Here is Erica bringing my vision to life. 🙂 

And Mindy! 

And took a trip to Disneyland and stayed at the Disneyland Hotel. My mom even came up for a day. We spent the night before Disneyland playing in the pool and the spa. We thought it was funny because Little T looks much older than he actually is. He was talking like a tough guy to some other kids in the spa who thought he was perhaps the same age, until he gave it away by pointing to me and saying, “hey, that’s my momma”, and (our favorite), “do you want to see my boo boo?” :p

When it was time to go to sleep, Little T listened to the Princesses on the Disneyland Hotel t.v. as they told bedtime stories. The next day he woke up ecstatic and ready to go. When we were in Star Tours, he pumped his fists into the air and shouted, “this is the BEST DAY EVER!!!!!!!” :p

I finally went on the Tower if Terror. None of us were thrilled to go, but Little T insisted. I told him I was scared and he said he’d protect me. I told him again that I was scared, and he said, “momma, I told you so many times, I’ll protect you, okay?” :p

That night, Little T stayed up longer than he’s ever been up before, and all of us watched Fantasmic together. He was scared at first, but really loved it. I think he just might enjoy feeling a bit scared sometimes, tough little guy. 🙂

We also took a trip to the Highland Springs resort and wandered around the olive trees.

And sat next to a garden snake.

We visited San Juan Capistrano:

And the Huntington Library, where little T tried to be a trooper, but was just soooo tired, poor little guy.

We wandered around Monrovia:

Cuddled with the house pets:

Took selfies and visited Fresno:

And went to Morro Bay, where Theo found pirate treasures, and Miss Piggy discovered that she loved the beach.

All in all, a lovely two weeks, and I was so sad to see my friends go. We promised it wouldn’t be five years before we see each other again, and said our goodbyes. It took about five minutes after I got home from the airport for Theo to say he missed them. I miss them too, Little T.

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. 🙂