I have awesome kids. Amazing and wonderful kids. Conversations with my kids amuse me constantly. They are some of my favorite people and I look forward to spending a lot of time with them on this road trip.
All that being said, I am still scared out of my mind about being in the car with them for extremely long periods of time.
My kids are curious, energetic, and intelligent. These are wonderful attributes when visiting places like The Huntington, which is one of our favorite family spots. The botanical gardens and library there are amazing and my kids will spend a whole day there without being bored. These attributes are wonderful when I'm looking for inexpensive things to do on our road trip, but not so great when trying to keep all that energy bottled up in a car.
All of my kids are avid readers...but all but one get car sick when they read in the car. Micah would be fine, but he reads books very quickly and I'll be working hard to keep up with him. Fortunately, my mom has a Kindle that he will be allowed to use sometimes, so we won't have to take up a lot of space in the car with all his books.
Micah is also a map guy. One trip to AAA and he is definitely set as far as maps go. I'll be making binders for the girls that have maps to color when we go into each new state and some printable games to go in there as well. License plate game and stuff like that are a must for that trip. We also have a few games that work in the car and some travel books that the kids will like.
We are borrowing portable DVD players from friends so everyone will have one of their own to watch. This will hopefully help keep the fights over what to watch to a minimum...of course, there's always the fight over which person gets to use the DVD...something will be there for them to fight about.
We will be stopping the car to eat almost every time, even though we don't plan on going eating fast food at all. I'm thinking parks and stuff like that where they can run and play for a while when we stop. We'll have balls and jump ropes for that stuff too, just in case there is no play ground where we are stopping.
Audiobooks will be coming out for evenings while driving. Probably right about when the sun goes down. Hopefully this will keep them quiet and may put the younger ones to sleep. That would be awesome.
We have the DSi for the older 2 and the twins have their Vtech Pockets. We had a regular DS, but it's broken now, so that will only work for 3 of them at a time. I don't expect that all of them will want to do everything at the same time, but I hate not having 4 of something just in case. Still, we will live, even if that means that someone is playing a game on my phone.
Music is obviously going to be very important. Becca and Micah have MP3 players, so that will be nice. Becca is into r&b and rap and my mom won't listen to that, so she will definitely be using hers.
I have a few travel games. We have a travel versions of Guess Who and Battleship. We also have a travel Scrabble. We also have a game called Rory's Story Cubes which is a game with 9 dice with pictures on the sides. A player rolls the dice and has to come up with a story that uses all the pictures. My girls love making up stories, so this one is really right up their alley.
Each child will have a journal for the trip. I look forward to seeing what they have to say if they let me read it. I'll be sharing my blogs (well, maybe not all...depends on what happens) with them, so I hope they will reciprocate, but if not, that's fine. I'll be blogging along the way, as well as Facebook. I may even get some stuff up on Youtube. I know I won't be bored.
Think I have enough stuff planned?
Me neither.
I know my kids getting bored is unavoidable, but I'm going to try really hard. Do you have any ideas?
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