Pages

"I love you and want for you all things that make you happiest; and I guess you, not I, are the one who knows best what those things are."

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Traveling with a Toddler

Everyone seems to panic when it comes to traveling any length or distance with a toddler.  I’m certainly no exception.  I’ve been diligently “googling” toddler car trip games for months because we’re preparing to embark on a 12-hour drive to Dallas in a few weeks.  Remarkably – the most common suggestions I’ve found for toddler entertainment include a portable DVD player, lots of Disney movies and traveling between the hours of 7PM and 5AM so as to encourage sleeping. 
Our plan right now is to drive several hours in the evening after dinner (hoping the boys will doze off and we can just dump them into bed at a hotel a few hours down the road).  We’ll be taking our portable DVD player and our fair share of Disney movies also, but I wanted something more for the boys.  You know, something that might require some brain power or possibly the use of a muscle (or two).  So I’ve put together some road-trip activity kits for the drive.  My hope is to distribute these kits over the course of the 24! hours we’ll be spending in the car on the way to and from our destination.
I’m hopeful that each activity kit (including the enclosed movie) will by us a minimum of 2-2.5 hours of entertainment.  I’ll have to report back to you on how that goes! You’ll notice that some of the items are more age appropriate for John (2.5 years) and some are more age appropriate for Nathan (11 months).
So here we go!!!!
Bag #1
Bag #1
Bag #2
Bag #2
Bag #3
Bag #3
Bag #4
Bag #4
Bag #5
Bag #5
Bag #6
Bag #6
Each activity bag is packed in a 2.5 gallon ziplock bag and the 6 bags are in a paper shopping bag with a handle.  We’ll also (obviously) have lots of snacks and drinks packed for the kiddos including dry cereal, cookies, granola bars, juice, water, shelf stable milk.  More on the snack side of things in a later post!
Happy Traveling!

See my post-vacation review of these activity bags here....

1 comment:

  1. Make a checklist for everything you need to take along with you when traveling with your toddler, so you don't forget anything. Also, before you start your own packing, finish off your baby's packing so you have ample time to organize everything.

    Travel Tips

    ReplyDelete