Mommy Mondays: Travel Tips for Three Year Olds

We're HOME!  It's such a good feeling after being away for a week.  Especially with the inlaws.  We've been doing a bunch of car trips lately, which makes this an excellent time to share with you how we've been handling travel lately.


We've actually been facing a couple of problems with our car trips lately.  The first is that back in October we gave Thatbaby's room an overhaul and somehow misplaced his travel bag.  The one with all our sure-fire car friendly toys.  Whoops.

The other issue is that Thatbaby has started letting travel excitement get to him.  So while usually we plan night driving so he'll fall asleep, instead he's been staying up and entertaining us.  Entertaining probably isn't the best description, more like screaming his head off for hours, singing songs with nonsense syllables or randomly shouting out words.  On the way to Palm Desert it was 20 minutes of "up down up up down up down down..."

So I wasn't really looking forward to the trip up to the inlaws for Christmas.  What used to take Thatboy and I about 7 hours is now a 12-13 hour trip.  It's a long day.

So here are the 3 travel tips we utilized:

1) Special snacks.  (I use this one for Thatboy also.)  Long road trips mean special snacks for the car.  I let Thatbaby pick out his own and he went with Super Mario fruit snacks.  I also stocked up on lots of healthier options like cucumber spears, clementines, and applesauce pouches (which are a special car-only treat).

2) Games.  Since we didn't have any of our usual toys for him to play with, we ended up playing a lot of games.  "I Py" (I Spy) was Thatbaby's favorite.  And we spent a lot of time playing it.  Thatbaby is also quite fond of "What does this look like?" which is my least favorite.  He constantly makes shapes with his sunglasses, food, etc.  It's fine the first 2 or 3 times, but gets old quickly after that.

3) The Ipad. We don't do a lot of screen time with Thatbaby.  Mostly because there are usually a million other things to distract him.  But not in the car!  So an ipad loaded with games and some of his favorite shows was a great way to keep him occupied once it started getting too dark to look at the scenery.  We got him a pair of headphones so that he could be in his own private bubble and we could have ours.

And of course, the ever popular "stop often" mentality helped us all survive.  We stopped for lunches, dinners, and more bathroom breaks than I could keep track of!