Entertaining your kids in the car.

I posted this on our family blog but I thought I'd post it again here. Over 4th of July weekend we took a family vacation to Grand Lake, Colorado. It's a 9-10 hour drive, and this time I tried a couple new things to for the kids' car ride, especially since we decided not to do any movies at all.

1. I made Eli his own little (18x12in) map he could use to follow along the way. We've driven this route before so there were several things I knew we'd be seeing along the way, like a bridge we always drive by when we're out for errands but rarely get to drive through, a HUGE train yard in Lincoln, and the Archway Monument in Kearney, so I added little pictures of those on his map along with all the road numbers we'd be looking for. Next time I have a couple more things I could add to the map that we saw this time: a rainbow colored water tower and a museum of military vehicles. I made sure to include all the road numbers, so he could look for specific numbers as we drove too. This kept Eli engaged for a long time, and he really enjoyed having his own map. I'm no artist and not everything's not quite in proportion but I did the best I could, and it's perfectly fine for this purpose.

2. I also made a BINGO game with a card full of things to look for, like stop signs, bulldozers, construction cones, motorcycles, wind mills, ponds, etc. I really didn't think Eli would especially understand finishing a row of pictures or even look for things on his own. So I mostly pointed things out to him, and he'd put a colored sticker on the picture. Turned out killing a lot of time and we enjoyed the game! I know of a few things I'd change, based on what we couldn't ever find and the things we saw a lot. If anyone is interested in using this game with your children, I'd be happy to email you the file, just let me know! I made three different cards. Just a few pictures are actually among the three cards, because they're mostly just rearranged. I just went to google images and typed something like "tractor clipart", found a picture I liked, and saved it to our computer. Some of the graphics still have a watermark on it but because the pictures are shrunk so small to fit on the card, you can hardly see the watermark so it doesn't bother me in the least bit. I'll definitely be doing BINGO like this again!

The other things we used for entertainment on the trip were a big stack of new library books. Usually I get a set of 8 books and Eli finds one or two that are his favorites. But this time because I really wanted him to like ALL of them, I made sure to get several books with familiar characters in it like Curious George, Arthur, Winnie the Poo, Thomas the Train, etc and he really did enjoy every single book. So between having reading time with the one of us parents reading and time where Eli just sat looking through his books, plus a few others we brought from home, that kept him occupied for a long time.

And then we had one diaper box of toys. One bigger toy for each child (like Eli's learning laptop and Hannah's little ark toy that has lots of buttons) and then the rest were all little things like teething rings, small cars and dolls, MagnaDoodles, rubix cube, play phones, etc. Eli was fine for the ride, but Hannah was the one who was got very restless and just began chucking one toy after another 30 seconds after we'd give it to her. If we had the opportunity I would've switched for some of the smaller toys we keep at Grandma and Grandpa's house, but we haven't been back home for quite awhile and they haven't been here for a few week, so we'll have to do that next time.

It wasn't always a smooth ride. There was a point when both children were screaming crying at the same time and I just had to stop and the nearest exit and refuse to drive anymore until they stopped. The crying was making my blood boil and I couldn't take it anymore. But that seemed to do the trick for everyone. And we made for a successful journey!

OTHER IDEAS:
* All around the edge of your BINGO card you could have graphics of windmills. Since they're so common (at least in these parts), you could put a sticker on a windmill every time you saw one. Or I remember playing ZIP! when I was younger. Whenever you saw a windmill you shouted ZIP! or some other silly word and whoever said it first got a point.

* You could play a truck game. Have a paper with different colored semi-trucks on it. Since trucks sometimes come a bunch at once, it would maybe hard to keep track of all together. But if you have several children you could assign each child a color or two and when they see a truck of their color they mark it next to the corresponding truck with either a sticker, a star, or tally mark or whatever. And you could find out what the most common truck color is on your drive. Just throwing that out there for ya...