Traveling with kids is what we do every year. We take about a 12-14 hours drive from North Carolina to see my family on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the Louisiana bayou area. It is really hard on us as adults, much less on our kids. Our kids have done pretty well over the years. I have found they were actually easier to deal with when they were really littler. As they get older, they seem to get harder to deal with during the drive. They were 3 and 7 plus a 9 year old during our last trip and they did pretty well. It is so hard being stuck in the car for that long. You try to save money by making and packing food, but then you just have to stop and stretch your legs and go to the bathroom. We drive straight down and try to stop as little as possible so we can hurry up and get there. Now on the way back we always stop at the half point, which is around the Atlanta, Georgia area.
Here are a few things we took on our trip along with toys and coloring books to keep the kids busy.
Puzzles and a Letter Foam Cube Builder
Mad Libs for the Girls
They read us their funny stories while we were traveling!
Lego's a big WINNER!
I packed the kids a few snacks so we didn't have to stop as many times. They were happy to have their own little snacks and drinks. I choose as mess free stuff as possible. Pull top drinks, Apple sauce pouches, Fruit Loops, Teddy Grahams and Nutter Butter Bites. They only issue was they wanted to snack on all of it at the same time, so their little lunch packs emptied quickly. These were just their snack packs, we had sandwiches and other things in the ice chest.
The Kids Snack Packs for the Trip
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| Snack Pack on the Go |
Car Bucks for Good Behavior While Traveling
I got the idea from another site about car bucks, but I didn't have much colored ink left in my printer. This was alright, because it let us make our own creation. I picked 3 colors of construction paper due to having 3 kids and no one could say so and so took my dollar because they each had their very own special color. With that being said I found the happy smileys, printed them out and let my 6 year old cut them out. I found a smiley stamper and stamped the corners for the "Corner Symbols." Kaylei(6) had fun helping make them.
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Girl Good Car Buck 1
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Girl Good Car Buck 2
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Boy Good Car Buck
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Cat Dollr : )
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| Kaylei's version of a Car Buck DIY Coloring Desk for the Car |
WHY??
Well....I was thinking the kids are always having to color crooked in the car so I made them their own little coloring desk! They were able to put their book and colors in it without any falling on the floor!
This past year....I have to admit we resorted to electronics, reading books and notebooks with crayons. It worked just fine as well. The only problem we ran into was the batteries dying and them not wanting to be done playing yet. What kind of tips or tricks do you go for when going on a long trip?