Creative Travel

Car trips with little one's can be challenging. Despite all of my efforts, we still endured a good bit of "are we there yet's?" If anyone has any ideas of ways to occupy little people on long trips, I'm all ears!!!!

In an attempt to make the 6 hour drive to San Diego as pleasant as possible, I tried to be creative and pull together some activities to occupy them.

To give the boys a visual idea of how far we had come and how far we had to go, I put together this:After each hour in the car, I would move over the clip and we'd pull out a new treat and activity.

Hour 1: eating Cheerios necklaces they had made the day before and playing with lacing cards.

Hour 2: munching on grapes and a new-to-us music CD from the library

Hour 3: a run and play stop in Yuma followed by a chapter from The House at Pooh Corner

Hour 4: beach bags to play with and swedish fish to munch on. The beach bags consisted of a ziplock filled with a bit of sand, a couple of shells, a swedish fish and blue hair gel. The concept was great, but I either needed to use plastic or rubber fish or shouldn't have put it together the day before. The poor swedish fish had practically discintegrated before they had a chance to play around with it. I will probably try this activity at home some other time when we are studying the beach again!

Hour 5: Pretty uneventful, since they fell asleep! (Mommy got some reading done!)

Hour 6: Fruit leather and The Tale of Peter Rabbit on tape.

On our return trip, I just rotated thru any activity I could think of. Everybody was pretty crabby, so success was limited.

The big hit on the way home was the car trays. I taped a pieces of paper to the inside of two cookie trays. The boys loved resting this on their laps and coloring. I also gave them little star stickers. This little bit of fine motor skill practice occupied them for a good 20 minutes. When they tired of that, I pulled out match box cars and they played with those on the tray. The trays will be a "must" on every car trip from here on out!