Five on Friday
Friday, February 19, 2010 at 12:06PM 1. My layout's up over on the Good Grief Blog today. Check it out, pretty please? ;)
2. Is it just me or do the little headshots of the athletes they've been showing on the Olympics seem very unflattering and rather 80's-ish? (I personally feel that there seems to be a movement to bring back the 80's lately and I am not a fan, lol.)
3. Yes, the new snow covering up the ugly old snow is nice. But, I'd rather be able to see my ugly matted grass and start hoping for greenness.
4. Any ideas on how to keep boys occupied during a two day road trip? We'll be driving to LegoLand this spring and can only watch so many dvds, kwim? We're hoping to stop along the way and do some sightseeing to help break up the driving and have a few audio books to listen to as a family, but any other ideas would be very appreciated!
5. I hereby vow not to watch any Olympics coverage today until I make a dent in sorting the boxes in the front room. Really. ;)
Reader Comments (4)
My only advice on the car ride is to fly instead. I am against driving anywhere that takes longer than about 3 hrs and even that is pushing with my girls. :)
Hi--When my kids were 2, 5 & 7 I took them on a cross country road trip from nevada to missouri to oklahoma and then home again to visit relatives (by myself!). We had the best time, but it did take a lot of pre-planning. I planned to drive about 7-8 hours each day and stopped early enough for the kids to unwind at the hotel and go for a swim. I also knew that we would be traveling 3 days to get to my sisters in Missouri, so I divided toys into three different bags for easy access about a month ahead of time (this way it was a happy thing to see some toys they hadn't seen in awhile). Of course, I had stickers and colored pencils and puzzle books, but I also included their binoculars, a camera, their own "travel journal" and some easy to play with in your lap toys (dinos and little dolls), as well as a road map clipped to a small clipboard for the older kids to keep track of where we were and license plates that we passed (Rand McNally has some really great travel-related kids books now, too--I've seen them at Target in the magazine section). Three of everything seems to work best with my crew, also. Anyway, i would pass out the toys whenever I thought we needed some entertainment and saved the movies for when I really needed to concentrate on the road (through Wyoming!). Also, whenever we did stop to get gas, I'd pull over to the side (or stop at a nearby park) and have the kids run, jump, hop, & do all kinds of race-related things to kind of help get the wiggles out. They loved it and we ended up having a really great, easy trip. And we only watched maybe one movie a day. Good luck and have fun!
I don't know how feasbile this is in your time frame...but my mom always had a knack for making those "Historical Roadside Markers" fun. So, we'd pull in to the little info sign and get out and read it. When we were little it was good "get out of the car" time...and then when we were older it was fun to learn some cool nfo. And it turns out I ended up as a History major :-)
To encourage my boys to look out the car windows we put a "bounty" on different things. For any object that we suggested, be it an animal, sign, or car color, they would get paid a bounty on that object. The more rare the object the higher the bounty. Another idea is to have a blank US map and have the boys fill in the states when they see the license tag from that state. Hope that helps.