For those of you who know me in real life, you know that there is nothing I hate more than a road trip. By golly, I loathe them. Get me on a plane and get me there A... S... A... P!!!! BUT in honor of our Thanksgiving road trip, I thought I would share my previous experience with road tripping with Baby Blossom
Well awhile back I took a road trip with Baby Blossom. Not a long trip mind you. A short one. Only about 3 hours (although that was PLENTY long enough for me)! Really the max amount of time that I like to spend in a car at any given moment generally tops out at an hour. So 3 hours was a pretty bold move for me... And even more so because I was flying solo with Baby Blossom. No hubby... Just us, a bag of toys and our current Kindermusik album. Two girls "enjoying" the open road... How did we survive you ask? So glad you did!
I have very little advice for taking babies on road trips. My advice is DON'T DO IT! But if you have to then this one tip is key... TIMING IS VITAL! Sleep time = when you should drive. But be careful. This can be tricky, we discovered the hard way. For us sleep time has to be napping, not bed time. SO we have to begin road trips when Baby Blossom would be going down for a nap which translates to late morning or afternoon. Driving at bedtime for us resulted in a LOT of tears and screaming and begging and pleading and ultimately exhaustion on everyone's part. Although, I know some people who do very well driving during bed time.
Next trick, when I'm flying solo, I fill the front seat with toys and if Baby Blossom chooses not to sleep then we play a rousing game of take one, pass one. This means I give her one toy and wait for her to drop, throw or otherwise lose said toy and then I pass her a new one. Only one though. That's important, we only get one toy at a time. And we save the best toys for emergencies. I always save the pacis for when she is about to have a stage 5 meltdown because that girl LOVES a paci. She doesn't like to use it in the traditional way... No, no because she doesn't follow rules. Rules follow her. And so she surely believes that pacis do in fact make the best teethers and THAT my friend is how you use a paci.
During road trips, we additionally employ the help of baby jams. Baby jams can be a wide variety of things, but we strive for quantity here not quality. You want to have a plethora of baby jams to choose from in case some don't work. I usually load up the iPhone as well as having a back up CD in the CD player of the car. To get your baby jam idea juices following, I'll tell you a little about Baby Blossoms preferences. When Baby Blossom was a newborn our baby jams included the Beatles as sung by Glee (had to be Glee too) and Daddy's version of Simple Gifts. Now that she's almost 9 months, she shows a preference for Frozen, Kindermusik, and B.O.B. If B.O.B isn't available then she will usually tolerate any number of rapped nursery rhymes as a replacement.
So let's recap of how to road trip with baby:
1. Drive during sleep time.
2. Initiate the take one, pass one toy game.
3. Employ baby jams.
In the event that none of the aforementioned things work, my only advice to you is to keep a stack of baby mum mums handy and attempt to bribe with food. 😉
Good luck and happy road tripping!
Love,
Jess
