What to do

With all the extras packed and close at hand, the best of times are to come!
The kids are always ready to go, to explore and to have adventures, the reality is that you hop into the car and start off... and it takes forever to get to your destination...
This is a given with us, we are truly six hours away from nowhere, so each and every trip we take is a long drive or an airplane ride. So, we start out with a quick game. I tell my son that he has to either sing a song or get out the games... and it works. More than likely, he will grab a game faster than the eye can see and start playing... now the younger of the group of kids will always complain, he doesn't like to play so much, he'd rather draw or play on his Ipad... nope! Nothing doing, that is for later on, and believe me... there's plenty of later ons.


One of the recent games is.. "Tough Choices" consisting of a list of questions, posed by players taking turns (but the older always takes over) asking what would you rather do, ie. would you rather ride in a bus or ride in a motor home? Or something equally silly. That takes up about 15 minutes if we are lucky. Move on to "Auto Bingo" that consists of finding stop signs and other road signs that are listed on the 'board', the first one to complete a row or black out wins a piece of candy... or not... maybe ticket to use (if I have had the foresight to make them) for a turn in the front seat or turn NOT helping unpack suitcases...which goes over well.

The games take around 30 minutes to complete. I mean, really, how long can you keep the kids occupied?  When we travel, I totally encourage a nap. Blankets and pillows are a must, and I have always explained that if you take a nap now, the trip won't feel so long. Always works, though they wake up asking the proverbial "Are we there yet?"  And of course the answer is usually no.  So for the remaining two hours, there is always another round of Auto Bingo, or the always mandatory... read a chapter of the book you have in your bucket... and that takes a little bit, but I've found that the older the kids get, they have to have a few more chapters added on to that time to make it last any time at all.

Recently, we took a trip with the two boys, my son and grandson, who are just two years in age apart. I tend to think of my grandson as my own kid, since they are so close in age, and since he spent the first five years with us for a huge part of the time. So he and my son have grown up kind of like brothers. When we travel together, people just assume they are siblings. They act like siblings. They fight like siblings, and well... I treat them like siblings. So, we took a trip, a pretty long road trip, that started out kind of like what I explained above, but... well, the first four hours it was just my grandson in the vehicle. My son had gone to camp and we picked him up, which is a four hour drive, after that, it was kind of fun, we drove through driving rain, over bumpy roads, and both boys were wired up, so there wasn't any sleep. They didn't want to play games so I allowed them to play on their Kindle/Ipad so they could play a game together. I think they ended up texting their friends, so off with the electronics. After another couple of hours in the vehicle, naps seemed good to them.

When we reached the point where we were spending the night, Black Mesa, where we had not planned to go but because of the heavy rain, opted for since it was closer to our immediate vicinity, we proceeded to find a campsite. First off, finding the first aid kit, since my grandson fell off the truck onto the asphalt, gouging his hands, knees, side and... well, scaring the daylights out of me. He was crying and my son was saying he had worse places, and my friend was trying to set up camp, and I was hunting for peroxide and antibiotic cream and bandages large enough to cover the bloody mess...

You know, that is the one thing you need to remember... put the first aid kit under the seat of the car, not under all the stuff in the tubs for the kids. I was  throwing toys and games and fruit rolls up out of the back seat, trying to find the kit...sigh...
Once bandaged, I started supper. We have kind of an agreement, that the boys set up stuff and I get the "kitchen" set up and cook dinner. I am legally blind so it is easier for me to deal with stuff that I packed, things that are familiar to me, that I can set up and work around and stay out of the way. So this arrangement works.

This trip, I packed extra little lantern, small LED flashlights, and an assortment of  glow in the dark games, like Ring-Toss, for the kids to play with after dark and of course, skewers and marshmallows and my daughter sent along a Jiffy Pop for each of the boys. Thing like that are always welcome... and also the packets of 'Astronaut' food... like icecream, or the Scrambled Egg packets that my daughter also included. They love that sort of thing.

Keeping the kids occupied is sometimes tiring, but really, there is so much to do with them...