And we are not talking about older kids here folks. We are talking about a 5 year old, a 3 year old and an 18 month old.
I knew when I was packing for this trip that surviving it would take some special preparation. I initially was planning on make this trip by myself with the kids and sorta last minute my mom bought a plane ticket down and came with me (BIG yay!!!). She was a life saver.
So knowing I needed something really creative to get us through.
Being myself I started putting out feelers with other moms for good ideas and soon got the perfect one.
One of our friends parents were in town a few weeks ago and she had home schooled her four kids and they were a military family so did a lot of car traveling. I started picking her brain and she said what she used to was she would make 2 hour goodie bags. The rule is that they only get a bag every 2 hours and the bag has snacks and activities in it.
I LOVED this idea.
The morning I started packing I had one of my friends babysit the kids for me and I set to work. I made 10 bags for each child which I marked, Juliette had a pink J, Linus had a blue L and Christian had a green C to make it easy to know what bag was for which child.
In each bag I put a juice box, some candy and treats, a pack of crackers and a craft project.
The craft projects were simple ones they could do themselves, I had only 3 different ones which I repeated a couple times each. One was pipe cleaners and beads (Christian only got the pipe cleaners to play with). Pipe cleaners are easy to string beads on for 3 year olds so I figured that would be better than string, plus then they can shape them into whatever they want and don’t only have to create bracelets and necklaces. They can do animal shapes or make key chains or whatever.
The second project was those foam stickers. I got two different packs, one was larger flower stickers that I figured would be easier for Juliette to peel the backs off of and the second pack was smaller musical instrument stickers which came with rectangle pieces to stick the stickers on to. I used baggies and put a handful of stickers and two rectangles in each baggie.
For Christian I just grabbed some regular stickers I knew he could peel off and put those in his bag.
The third project was just a magazine, scissors, glue stick and a couple pieces of construction paper that they were allowed to cut and paste with. I thought for sure this would be a disastrous mess but it actually ended up not so bad.
The whole thing worked absolutely perfectly.
I felt like it kept the junk food eating to a minimum because they only got that little bit every couple hours and the craft project entertained them for a a period of time and was something different than the coloring books and DVD’s (yes I admit I bought a DVD player with the excuse that we are making this drive a total of 4 times this summer so that totals 80 hours in the car).
They loved it and I loved it and I will making lots more such bags for our other trips!
Here is a sample of what was in one of Linus’ bag:
- Huckleberry Plum Pie - January 1, 2017
- Fresh Mango Sorbet - July 17, 2016
- Steak Caesar Salad - June 8, 2016
