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We’re home from our first vacation as a family of five to Tahoe! Preparing road trip activities to keep a four, two and one year old busy was quite the challenge. I’m excited to share these ideas with you, because they were a hit with the kiddos!

When they say there’s no such thing as a vacation with little ones, they’re not kidding! I’m exhausted, but so happy we got this time together as a family with my parents. The kids had a blast and we made some great memories.

 

Packing the car for our nine hour drive was a bit tricky. All three kids are still in car seats and we opted to keep our small SUV until it’s paid off, so space for road trip activities was at a premium. I had to limit myself to the space right at my feet in the front seat for storage. I made it work though by keeping it to small toys, puzzles, and drawing tools, along with an awesome travel Busy Binder (what else would you expect from the queen of Busy Binders?) and some super cool lap trays that I think are dang clever, if I do say so myself.

Check out these fun road trip activity trays!

I picked up two lightweight padded lap-desks from Hobby Lobby and two cookie sheets from the dollar store. I’ve seen a few pins about using cookie sheets as lap desks on road trips because they’re small and have a lip to keep crayons and such from rolling off the edge. I thought it was a great idea, plus I loved that they’re magnetic, but I didn’t like the idea of Squeaks and Little Dude banging away on metal trays if Flash fell asleep. Then I noticed that their coloring books were wider than the trays, so that was no bueno.

So I made the cookie sheets velcro to the lap desks! *Cue angelic trumpets* I put a little square of velcro (loop side on the trays so it wouldn’t be scratchy on their arms. See bottom right photo, above) on the bottom corners of the trays making them removable. When they were playing with magnets or small toys we attached the trays. When they needed to be a bit more quiet, wanted to color, or did larger activities we removed the cookie sheets. It worked great!

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Since the cookie sheets are magnetic I wanted to find some fun magnetic toys to use with them. Magformers were a huge hit with both kids. Little Dude enjoyed building a garage for his fire truck. For Squeaks, I put one of her magnetic Melissa & Doug dress up dolls on our scanner, printed out the image, and laminated it. Voila! Magnetic paper doll! I just kept the magnetic clothes in a zipper pencil case in my binder. She loved it! This also helped me save a little room when packing since I didn’t have to bring the big wooden doll or the storage tray.

I found a small plastic tote to store the majority of the activities. I bought mine at Hobby Lobby, but you can also get it here. It’s perfect because it’s clear so I can see everything inside, and the sides are straight up and down for maximum storage space. It fit just right on the floor of the front seat and still left me leg room.

Here’s what’s inside:

1. A new coloring book for each kid that they hadn’t seen before.
2. A Melissa & Doug Water Wow and Scratch Art On The Go activity.
3. Notebooks with blank coloring paper (mine are from Target, but these are the same idea.)
4. Crayons and coloring pencils. I counted the crayons to make sure none got left to melt in a hot car. Each kid got one of each primary color.
5. Magformers for the cookie trays.
6. Firik kids headphones. They’re made for little ears so the volume doesn’t go up very high, they Velcro in the back so they can be easily adjusted, and the kids looked ridiculously cute in them! We only resorted to screen time when it was necessary (hour eight of driving and Flash was finally asleep), but these worked great and fold super flat for storage.
7. A mini Boogie Board. This one is a generic one I found at Target, but we have a full size Boogie Board at home and use it all the time. That’s kind of why I didn’t want to pack it. I didn’t want anything to happen to it because I love it so much!
8. A mini Melissa & Doug bear puzzle. This one is mostly for Squeaks. It came with different faces and outfits for the bear. Just something fun and cute she hadn’t seen before.
9. And finally, Flash’s activities. Keeping a one year old busy on a road trip is probably the most challenging. They have no idea what’s going on and you can’t really even hand them any snacks because of choking hazards. I kept it pretty basic and just stuck to board books with bright colors, teething toys, and a new key toy that made noise that he hadn’t seen before. In the end an empty plastic water bottle he could squeeze and crunch kept him the happiest, and thankfully he slept a lot.

Lastly, my travel Busy Binder of awesomeness (that’s the official name).

I stored this right on top of the plastic tote. It mostly contains my own printables plus a few additional fun things.

1. Hidden Picture book and Bible Mazes book for Squeaks (I bought both of these at Hobby Lobby)
2. Color hunt wheel for a variation on “I spy”.
3. Shapes matching game.
4. Color matching game.
5. Ten Commandments memory game.
6. Creation memory game.
7. Squeaks magnetic paper doll.
8. A page of roads for Little Dude to drive some toy cars on.

With these fun road trip activities I was able to keep my kiddos pretty happy during the drive. There was the inevitable “are we there yet?” every once in awhile, but for the most part, they did really well. And it was mostly screen free (I cut myself a little slack for using screens to keep them super quiet so Flash could sleep). I’d say our road trip activities were a huge success!

How often do you take road trips as a family? What are your favorite car games?