Traveling Suggestions

If you're traveling this season here are some tricks to entertain your kids while traveling in the car or on a plane:

Aluminum Foil Art
Give everyone a sheet of aluminum foil. Have them mold it into anything they want: animal shapes, Frisbees, balls, jewelry, crowns, headband, necklaces and masks. Be creative. Also a great activity for toddlers. For more ideas read this article I wrote about fun with aluminum foil!

Pipe Cleaner Creatures
Use fuzzy pipe cleaners to create all kinds of creatures that kids can also use for creative play. This activity kept my daughters busy for two hours on a recent trip! See this article for pipe cleaner craft ideas! Benderoos (Wikisticks) are also very handy and easy peasey to take into a restaurant. They're sold at Wal-Mart.

Practice a Foreign Language
The car is a great place to practice speaking a new language, especially since you have a captive audience and lots of stuff to look at for learning vocabulary. Try this -- For the next 10 miles, everyone in the car may only speak Spanish (or French, or whatever)! Point out things you see in Spanish, say please and thank you. And if you don't know any Spanish, you may not speak (this will inspire your kids to learn some, or give you your very own version of the Quiet Game!)

Roll of Tape
Tape is irresistible to kids! Give them a roll and let them go crazy. If you're really lucky, some of it ends up zipping their lips shut for fun (sounds almost too good to be true!). Here's a book that uses 4 rolls of tape as art to entertain - it's called Totally Tape.

Crocodile Dentist

This one is always a hit with my kids, especially when they were preschoolers, and it's self contained so you can't lose any of the pieces! It's fairly small and fits into a backpack too. The secret to keeping it fun is to keep this stored away and ONLY use it on long trips, so that it is fresh every

Let's just hope I can stretch these ideas out for the entire trip.

Also, hot off the press, our reunion shirts for Mat's family. Here's our attempt at becoming professional models in our own little world. I'm sure someone will discover our talent. Someone. Anyone?



Screen printing these babies consumed a good portion of our weekend



but, all 43 of them are done and....



we had time to play yesterday

5K
Mat ran 6 5Ks before the actual one started so he herded the kids so the rest of us could run.



You're always this happy when you run with a look-alike Bono



Little Dutch oven cookin', nothing like roasting Peeps on an open fire!