So far I have been pretty lucky as far as traveling with the kids goes.  Jayna was a good traveler from day one, and she has proven to be a great entertainer for Amelia now!

We do have a DVD player which is only used for long trips, but I’m always looking for new ways to keep them entertained.  So with our vacation to up north a couple of weeks ago, I turned (yet again) to Pinterest!

I found this site….it has a long list of ideas for traveling with toddlers.  Most were kind of obvious, but good reminders (and very simple and cheap).

But the site Moms Minivan was really the jackpot!  It has a ton of ideas and lots of printables.  One of the ideas there was to give your kids one of these little tickets every half an hour.  Then, they can trade in tickets for special prizes, like a movie, or a piece of candy.  And since Jayna has been in the “I want it NOW” phase lately, I think that this system taught her some  patience and math skills too!

The tickets worked like a charm after about an hour, and Jayna was able to trade them in…then she really understood the system.  Our trading system was

I thought she would have a hard time learning to “save up” for her movies, but she did really well, opting for the “surprise bag” the most.  We only watched one movie the whole 10 hour trip!

I did not bring the busy bags that I had created for our trip to Tennessee, but I did use the actual, physical bag from one of those activities to carry all of my “surprises.”  In the surprise bag, there were several different activities each in ziplock bags.  I would give her a choice between two (which allowed me some control over the activies…some of them were noisy!!).  Some of the activities were:

But, I lucked out again and Jayna spent a lot of time sleeping in the car. Unfortuantely, this posed another problem.

And I ain’t payin for no kid-chiropractor!  So, I made these.

Ahhh….much better!

 Aren’t they cute?!?!

What’s your best trick for long car rides?  Leave a comment!

Linkin’ up here this week!