It's especially challenging to keep children entertained for over 8 hours in the car. The longest day on the road for last year's Yellowstone trip was 13 hours! What in the world can the kids do that long without getting bored and driving parents batty? Well a lot of planning went into those travel days and I'm already starting the travel day planning for this this years trip.
Here are some great entertainment things that I found... The first one is of course the behind the seat DVD player. If you can get them to watch a full movie for at least an hour that helps make the miles fly by. The other electronic device that we used was iPads. Lots of apps were downloaded and made to be fresh for the entertaining. Between using those two means of entertainment we did a number of things. By breaking up the screentime it helped them from being zombies to the devices.
So there was a lot of planning and purchasing that went into putting 4 bags together of things that they could play with on the trip. That was one bag for each day of travel. This helped keep the next days items fresh and new. We could always pack a few of the good things in the truck for everyday but having that special bag for the day was helpful. This was also a tricky task having enough different things for an eight year old girl and a two year old boy without breaking the bank. I also wrapped up dollarstore like items for them to unwrap after a certain amount of miles/time in the car as long as they didn't have to put a timeout bag on their head during that last window of time.
Here are some items that I purchased for the activity bags last year:
I am already planning and purchasing for this year too. Got my order delivered and am so excited to share them. But in the interest of surprising the kids I will wait until on the road or after we get back. If you are interested to hear more just send me a shout out for a sneak peak or advice.
I love this site - www.travelkiddy.com
Some of the wonderful activities that we did out of the books, games and other things included:
- License Plate Bingo
- Game where Sammie and I had eyes closed and Daddy tried to trick us with making true or false statements about what we were driving around.
- I Spy
- Game where you had to start a story and each person had to add an item to it and repeat the list. How good of a memory do you have?
- Puppet Shows
- Coloring (make sure the are very washable markers)
- Reading books
- And so many others I can't remember right now....
So I'm a little nervous about the six days of 7-8 hours of driving this next trip. But never fear, Super Mommy is here....