What to do with 2 kids and 2,000 miles?

Before we left on Thursday (12/6), we spent Wednesday night packing...one hint let the little ones help you pack. I told Allyson & Thomas that we will start with their clothes. I told them that we would be gone for 4 days...that they would need 4 undies, 4 socks, 4 bottoms & 4 tops plus their pajamas. They went running to their rooms and started picking out their clothes. I gave them each a backpack and told them to put their clothes in their bags. So this way they knew what they would be wearing while we were gone.

Next came entertainment:
Mark told them that we would be spending a lot of time in the car and to bring their favorite things to play with. This is what they ended up with:

One bucket filled to the brim with toys:



One bucket filled with dinosaurs:


Our case of DVD's for the DVD player:


Allyson & Thomas have always been fairly good travelers. Unless we go on windy roads then Allyson gets car sick. But we did go prepared with buckets just in case...but thank God we did not need to use them. Our problem was mainly "I have to go potty." usually after we would pass an off ramp or rest stop.

And we played lots of games. At school Allyson is learning about rhyming and how to sound out words to spell them on her own. So along the way we found words that rhymed with car, road, tree, truck, bus, hotel, motel, food to name a few. Allyson & Thomas love to color and draw so we brought along crayons, markers, coloring books and a traveling journal.


One thing that helped was that we did most of the traveling during the night, when we did not have to make as many stops to go to the bathroom. We left on Thursday after Allyson got out of school. By the time we got to the California/Oregon border it was dark and they went to sleep. And then we got about half way down California before we stopped for the night. Then started again in the morning. We also played a game Allyson calls "Where are those people going?" Which we would look at the different cars we passed and made up a story about where we thought they would be going, how long the would be gone from their homes. If driving to San Diego, try to beat the rush hour traffic in LA. We ended up sitting in LA traffic for almost 2 hours. But Allyson and Thomas thought that was fun because they could count the different cars and colors. And now they recognize how each state has a different license plate, so we counted the different plates that we saw.

I will post more pictures of our trip tomorrow...