Roadtrips

When you are sitting in the car with your little ones/ or little two's it is not always as easy as on the above picture. If you are traveling more than an hour the trip can be a disaster. I would like to describe to you how we take drives a lot with our kids as every family member could enjoy the trip at least a little bit.

In my case my kids aren't allowed to watch TV or movies (the only exceptions is when we take a long-haul flight).  It could be a separate topic or post why but in this post I would like to focus how to travel in the car without watching any DVDs.

What To Bring

• LEGO or a similar toy that your kids like and can play with more than 15 minutes.  LEGO has the advantage that with relatively few pieces you can have infinite variability. 

• CDs with kids music and stories

My kids really like to listen to some Hungarian children's music and we are very lucky because there are so many good singers and good songs were written in Hungarian. They have some favorite English artists as well such as Nancy Cassidy. When my older daughter, Sophie was two years old we started to show her the stories on CD. At first it was a little hard for her to understand them, but after a while she enjoyed hearing them. Of course she'd like to choose which ones interest her the most and repeat them so many times that the parents go crazy.

• Books

If we are traveling somewhere I always bring books with us. The smaller picture books are better in the car, because the kids can easily hold them in their hands.

• Puppets

When my girls are very tired to prevent them from crying I play with puppets to them. The only danger with this is it can never be enough.

• Etch-a-sketch

The first time when I had to travel with Sophie I bought a similar etch-a-sketch to this. My daughters love to draw and it is a very good way to draw without any paper and crayons during a drive in the car.

We also like the game, "Guess what I am drawing!". Sophie starts to draw something and somebody has to guess what it look's like.

My Advices What to Do

• Play games in the head: barkochba

Barkochba: I think about something. It could be a creature or a thing. The other people who are playing can ask questions but I can only answer with a "yes" or "no". Is this thing in the car? Did we see it today? Etc... The goal is to figure it out exactly what it is.

• Make words with the last letters

Somebody says a word, for example "apple". The next player has to tell a word with "e" because that was the last letter in it. "Easel" and it goes and goes for a minimum of 10 minutes.

• Watch you surroundings and make games 

It depends what kind of landscape you's going through on your trip. Usually close to the highway we can see cows, sheep, horses. We can play a game, "How many animals do you see in five minutes"?

• Give them food if they are hungry :)

When our Sophie was 1.5 years old we drove 1864 miles (=3000 km) in 10 days. We survived it even without any bad memories. I'm not saying it isn't tiring to cheer a kid up but if you like to travel it's totally worth it.