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Right now, we live in Georgia. His family lives on the Southern half of the East Coast, so they’re not far from us, and we can see them pretty frequently. Then there’s my family. My family lives in Texas. It’s about a 14 hour drive. And that’s without stopping for gas, or bathroom breaks.
I know some people have the TV’s installed in their vehicle but that’s not us. #1 It’s out of our price range, #2 We’ve made a personal decision to limit our daughter’s TV viewing. She get’s obsessed way too easily, and she picks up some bad habits from her viewing. Please don’t write to tell me how much of a lifesaver it is for you. It may be the right decision for you. It’s just not for us.
Since we’ve eliminated that option, here’s what we do to make life easier:
- Pack simple food items…a jar of peanut butter, bread (0r crackers), snack items (can be anything from potato chips to carrot sticks). If you separate the snacks into little baggies, that makes it much easier. We also packed Gerber baby puffs, formula, and baby cereal.
- Pack an ice chest with drinks for the road. For us we packed water, soda, and energy drinks. For the 5 year old, we had water & juice packs. For the baby we had water & apple juice for each kind of bottle we make her.
- Speaking of drinks, limit their drinking. I can’t stress that enough. If you let them guzzle drinks like there’s no tomorrow, you’ll be stopping ever hour, and it will take forever to finish the trip. Obviously don’t dehydrate your children, but you know how much you can appropriately limit.
- Speaking of bathrooms, any stop you make, everyone goes to the bathroom. Period. The absolute only exception we make to this, is if our daughter is soundly sleeping during the night portion of the ride. Generally she sleeps through the night, so we don’t wake her up. But we do have to be aware that if she wakes up for some reason, she will probably need to stop at a bathroom.
- Speaking of stops (okay my last speaking of, I promise!), it doesn’t matter how fast you want to get there, if you get tired stop. It’s not worth your safety, or the safety of your family to push it. Stop and get an energy drink/coffee, get out and stretch your legs, or if you need to pull up to a (well-lit) rest stop & nap, by all means do so.
- Bring along music for the road, cause radio stations won’t always be there. (Unless you have satellite radio of course.) Bring kid-appropriate music for the daytime. At night when they’re asleep, have your preferred driving music on hand. This will vary from person to person. My Dad can drive with classical music all night long. I love classical, but not while driving at night. My husband will listen to everything from the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack, to the Plain White T’s.
- Keep your routine as much as you can. If you do meals at a particular time, try and do the meals at the usual time. That will help prevent some kiddo-crankiness. If your kids have naptimes, you can keep naptime on the road. Have pillows and blankets ready for that.
- Have fun items for your kids. For our sanity, we reduce the amount of noisy toys she takes with her. (It’s a small car, don’t hate me.) She takes books, coloring pads & Twistable Crayons (to prevent breaking), and 1 or 2 stuffed animals. We bring teething toys and the most amazing baby toy ever Fisher Price Ocean Wonders Soothe and Glow Seahorse, Pink. Seriously, she’s out in record time with that thing.
Okay, sorry this list has been so long, but here’s a few last minute tips.
- Husbands, if your wife is staying awake to keep you awake, you can’t pull over and ask her to take over driving. Not that Gunlover has ever done that.
- You know your kids. You know what tricks will work with them, that wouldn’t work with our kids. For example, we actually kept the 5 year old quiet & happy for a long time by suggesting that she play the quiet game with her baby (non-talking) sister. And she actually went for it! Again, I don’t expect this to work for all of your kids. But you never know.
What tips & tricks did I forget? Have you done anything on my list? How did it work for you? Leave me some commentary and let me know what you thought.
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Oh man I know all about this. Our family lives in Texas too, but we’re in North Carolina so every time we drive home it is about a 27 hours drive. Because of limited leave (we’ve never been allowed to take more than 13 days of leave at once), we always drive straight through without stopping for the night.
We have a toddler and also don’t have/believe in having a dvd player in the car. We take our laptop and in an emergency (aka a major test on our sanity) we will turn on one movie, but when the battery dies there’s no more. Aiden brings a lot of books and coloring things. He has two recordable story books which keeps us from having to read the same book to him over and over. Also he loves listening to music and dancing so when he starts to get really irritated we make up silly songs with him.
It’s definitely an adventure taking long road trips with kiddos!
27 hours? Oh I feel for you. Yeah the military is good like that. If they had their way though, you’d drive 5 hours, stop for the night, drive 5 hours, stop for the night. It would take some of us FOREVER to get there that way.
Haha yeah major tests of insanity are almost a guarantee on a drive that long!
I feel for you. That is a long drive. I know we try to limit our TV for kids also so there is no DVD player in our car either. What I did get with my job at DISH Network is the TV Everywhere. SO in cases where we can’t handle it anymore I can access our TV and our recordings from my Iphone. So when they start getting restless and we need a break I let them watch one of their TV shows on my phone and that’s it. It’s shorter than a DVD so it works for us.