Traffic pro

Finally my life is slowing down a bit. I will now be trying to catch up on everything. My parents have been here from Arizona for a week. They just left early this morning. I am very behind on everything. It may take me a week just to catch back up.

We had fun though and did a lot of driving with the kids. Living in a small town means that even a trip to the grocery store is a drive to the next town. One one of our drives this week I decided to do a post about traveling with kids.

As most of you know I have three girls. This has always meant that traveling must be planned out ahead of time or there will be arguing and boredom. I try to keep it fun and interesting so I do not have to keep hearing the usual... "I'm bored", "Are we there yet?", and "She won't leave me alone". So here are a few of our traveling tips.

We like to have the kids look up the places we go on the internet and then have them report back to us what they have found out. This gets them more interested in the trip and they spend more time looking for the things they have read about.

Print out some fun games and activities for the trip. You can find lots of fun games, puzzles, word searches, and activity pages on many websites. When you need the kids to be quiet for awhile the pages help out a lot.

How many times have you used a portable DVD player just to find the kids did not watch the movie? Why not play family videos? Kids do not ever get tired of watching themselves. They could be entertained for hours.

When you want the kids to have fun and play nice together, games can be great. Have fun creating your own games with your family. Here are some ideas... Travel Bingo, create your own bingo cards that have to do with your trip. each time they see something that is on their card they get to mark it off. Score Cards can be created that list things the kids would see on the trip. each time they see an item they put a mark next to it to keep score. You can also have a license plate score card to keep track of what states have been seen. Sticker Detective can keep kids busy too. Hide some stickers in magazines and the kids can look for them. They will find interesting things to read and stay busy while they look.

You can reward your kids with good behavior by using play money. Most of us have old games that we no longer play because we have lost some of the pieces. I think we have play money from 3 games just sitting around. You can also use some plastic pirate coins that you can get cheap at toy stores. Boys would love to collect pirate treasure during their travels. You can reward your kids with play money for good behavior. Then they can cash it in for the next idea.

Going places with kids can be very stressful if you have to deal with kids begging and whining for you to buy them things. Before we go anywhere we make it clear what is expected from the kids and if they can spend any money. If you tell your kids exactly how much they are able to spend you do not have to deal with the begging and whining. They will spend more time really thinking about what to spend their money on instead. It is amazing how frugal kids become when it is their own money they will be spending. This would also be perfect to go along with the reward money they earned. They could then spend the reward money.

I always joke that all I collect is dust. My kids however collect many things. One of the things they collect when we travel is postcards. Most hotels sell postcards very cheap. We have even found places that sell 5 for $1. They also tend to cover ones from more areas around them so you can do one stop shopping. Try to find souvenirs that they will not outgrow like T shirts. You could start a new tradition like collecting location related cookie cutters. Then when you make cookies you can talk more about your memories from the trip.

** I hope you have found at least one idea that can help you travel with kids. If you would like to share some things you do as a family feel free to do so in the comments. If you choose to talk about traveling with your kids on your blog be sure to comment with a link so others here can check it out.