T2

I’m cheating really, I need to post about our actual vacation. But here is a little photo collage celebrating the cuteness of Thatcher on vacation

Road Trip, Part 1

Today is a sad day. Our vacation is officially over. Justin and I had 2 weeks off of work for a road trip to Lake Tahoe, where we stayed at my MIL’s family’s cabin. The vacation itself was slightly more eventful than desired, I will share more on that later. Today I wanted to talk about a successful 10 hour drive with a 1 and 3 year old.

Needless to say, I did some excessive planning prior to the trip. I wanted to have lots of stuff for the boys to do. I wasn’t so worried about Thad, he really does great in the car, but 10 hours is a LOT for any 1 year old. But even with that intention, Thatcher was still the harder one to plan for.

Here is what I did:

I had 2 boxes of goodies: One with toys and one with books. Each box fit perfectly on the floor of the car beneath their feet. Our trip was a total of 8 days, which required a lot of packing, so I tried to keep entertainment stuff pretty compact and not take up a ton of space.

For the toy box I had a bunch of either pencil boxes or pencil bags that I got at Walmart for a buck apiece. Perfect size for filling with kid supplies, and easy for them to open and close.

The pencil bags were stuffed with random collections of items: simple puzzles, matching cards, noise makers, animal figures, Memory, etc. The orange bag was Thatcher’s favorite; it had a random collection of items that I got from one of the I Spy pictures that my mom made for Thad. The black bag was for Thad only, it was a “small things” bag with a bunch of little stuff in it: a magnifying glass, a mini microscope, a mini measuring tape, some silly putty, a mirror, some I Spy cards and a little purse full of tiny figurines (again, taken from a I Spy picture that mom did).

The pencil boxes were little sets of things to play with. The goal with these was to have toys that they could DO something with.

Cars and Roads Box (and pom pom trees :). The roads are painted popsicle sticks with magnets on the back, so they can be used on a small cookie sheet (that I got from the Dollar Tree). I got the idea here. I actually wish I had done more stuff with magnets, it worked so well on the cookie sheet, especially because it kept stuff stationary and not slipping around.

Construction Box filled with the most fought over toys we have: construction machines. They fight over these so much that I broke down and did something that I am morally opposed to…bought a second set and gave up on sharing. Also included was a bag of little rocks to push around and scoop up. Again, this was an activity for use on the cookie sheet, which has a nice lip on it.

Play Doh and Dishes Box. Yeah, that’s right, I let them play with Play Doh in the car (on the cookie sheets). And yes, it made a mess. But it also kept them occupied, and only required a quick brushing out of the crumbs afterword. I consider that a win. I made a quick batch of Play Doh a day or so before we left and stuck it into some baby food containers that fit into the box perfectly. I put a set of dishes in for each child along with silverware.

Animals and Blocks Box  Part of the idea with these boxes and bags was to put things together in new combinations and keep it interesting. The animals are always a favorite in our house, and that was true of the trip as well.

Writing Implements Box. This one was just filled with pens and crayons and a pair of scissors. The crayons are really cool because they are twist up, so you can’t break them. Thad doesn’t like to use broken crayons (coo-coo) and Thatcher likes to rip the paper off of crayons, which really bothers me (coo-coo). Crayons are great in the car too because they don’t write on other things like pens do. On that note, I brought some of those Crayola markers that only write on special paper, thinking that Thatcher may like to color and wanting to keep destruction to a minimum. He promptly ate the tip off one of the markers and threw the rest on the floor of the car. Fail.

Speaking of coloring, I also brought a binder full of different paper activities. Some pages pulled out of coloring books, plain construction paper, lined writing paper, worksheets, sticker pages, etc.

Sorry for the evil looking clown. It’s a color-by-number page. It looked less scary when it was colored in. The nice thing about paper activities is that they take up very little space, but can occupy lots of time. The downside is that Thatcher’s coloring privileges quickly went in the toilet after the pen-eating incident. He really isn’t old enough. But great for older kids.

Another topic of entertainment was CDs. Don’t just think about music CDs, there are lots of different things you can get: picture books on disk, full length books on disk, music books on disk, etc. (We don’t own most of these…got them from the good ol library)

Along that same line, the book box was full of….books. (Duh) But again, a variety of different stuff. Books to go along with the music disks (Like Wee Sing, and Driving my Tractor) and picture books for the books on disk (Pete the Cat, The Little House). Lots of new story books from the library, along with some non-fiction books from the library. And, of course, I included some of our trusty travel books that Thad has been known to look at for an hour at a time, like this one:

I did bring lots of picture books, but we have been reading chapter books too, which is nice as a change of pace for the reader, to just read and not have to show pictures. We are currently reading The Mouse and the Motorcycle.

Some of the books that I got from the library had paper activities to go along with them:

And JUST IN CASE you don’t think I’m crazy yet, let me tell you about my new purchase: a laminator. A week before the trip, I panicked, thinking that all my activities would be useless unless we had this magical item: a lap tray. I bought 2 from amazon. They are nice and we will definitely use them, but I really wanted it to work for Thatcher because he has a hard time keeping things where they need to be. Unfortunately, his car seat is reclined enough the the tray really is at an angle towards him and doesn’t give him a flat surface. So really they will work better as the kids get older. BUT, at the same time, I also ordered this laminator. I had a bunch of stuff that I wanted to print and laminate, and was planning to do it through Kinko’s FedEx, but it is SO EXPENSIVE! For one color printing on cardstock with lamination it would be $3.00! Too rich for my blood. So, I spent $35 on a laminator and 100 sheets of laminating folders (the price on the laminator went up since I bought it….sucka!) So now I can laminate to my heart’s content, and was able to make lots of fun stuff. (These will all have links in case you think they are as super cool as I do)

Matching cards: Animals and their tracks

Butterfly wings for matching

Matching animals to their silhouettes

Matching seasons to clothing

Matching whole fruits to halved fruits

The seasons

Number puzzles

And of course, the life saver of all life savers….a DVD player. (Thanks to my friend Ashley for letting us borrow this!!) It truly came through for us more than once. A little bit of screen time is not going to kill kids during a long car ride. Embrace it. My sister told me you can borrow these from her library. Something to look into.

Oh, and I made both boys some neck pillows from this template. They literally took maybe 15 minutes to make. You can see what they look like with my handsome model. Clearly, he is fast asleep here.

Well I think that’s about it. It may seem like a lot, but it was fun for me to plan and put everything together. I definitely don’t feel like I did too much. Not only did we use this stuff for the 20 hours in the car, but we were away from home for 8 days….that’s a lot of time to kill. They played with a lot of this stuff while we were there, too. One thing that I would do differently in the future would be to make more things magnetic. The Dollar Tree cookie sheets were awesome. They worked way better and were more useful than the $15 lap trays. They would have been even better if we had more things that STUCK to them. The only things that were magnetic were the car roads and the matching butterflies. After we got back, I found this site, which has tons of printable roads/farms/racetracks/dino lands/pirate maps that we could have done on the cookie sheets. If you have girls that aren’t into this stuff….sorry. I’m not sure what to do. Bring dolls or something. Kidding.

Anyway, that’s my road trip prep in a nutshell. A large nutshell. More on the trip itself to come!