How to Travel with Kids

The number one key to traveling with kids is preparation.  We recently traveled across the country with our 3 1/2 year old and during the long hours of flying, I was grateful I had planned ahead.  So today I’ve put together a little list, and a few ideas for how to travel with kids!

The first thing I did, when preparing for our trip, was get on Pinterest and find any, and all, good ideas for traveling with kids.  Among my favorites were coloring and sticker books, stringing Cherrios, and a snack and play travel tray with a flat surface to play on, and pockets to hold all the toys.

I ordered the snack and play travel tray here and it was worth every penny.  I can see us using it for years on airplane trips and car rides!

Next I went to Wal*Mart and picked out some “special” snacks for her and put them in her carry-on pack.

After filling her back pack with treats I packed her travel tray with her new princess headphones and a new Tinker Bell sippy cup.  We have lots of sippy cups already but I thought a new and exciting cup would give here something to look forward to, and it totally worked! 

I knew we couldn’t bring a lot of toys on the plane so I packed her princess lunchbox full of all her little princesses and a few cars.  I didn’t want her to get bored so I made sure to bring a variety of things to do!

Since she was missing school for this trip I also packed the homework her teacher had given me.  I think doing her homework ended up being one of her favorite things on the plane!  She was also really excited to tell her teacher that she did her homework up in the sky!

I also made sure to pack plenty of crayons and a pencil for school work.  While we were at Wal*Mart we also stocked up on lots of fun stickers.  She loved the stickers and even ended up sharing some of them with other kids on the plane!

A few other things I packed were this huge coloring book, a bunch of stickers and some beads for stringing necklaces and bracelets.   I ordered the coloring book from Amazon and it ended up being even better than I thought!  It was full of pages to color but also had lots of puzzles, mazes, etc. in the back of the book, which meant hours of entertainment!

The last thing I bought for her was a doll she’d been dying to get!  She had been saving her money for weeks to purchase it so I ended up buying it for her as an extra special treat for our trip. 

Dora was a huge surprise to her and entertained her for the whole trip!

 So did the stickers… {wink}.

Another tip for traveling with kids is to create some sort of normalcy for them.  One of the days were were in Tennessee we had a couple hours to kill so we found a park and just let Malea run around.  It was fun for her and it got a lot of her “pent up” energy out.  No matter where you are you can usually find a park to let your kids run around on and just be kids.  Letting kids be kids for an hour or so is good for everyone!

The last, and most important key to traveling with kids is patience.  It’s important to remember that things might not always go as planned, their schedules might get “off” and they might be a little fussier than normal, but remember that traveling is hard on kids.  Kids don’t always adapt as well to different time zones and different schedules, like we do.  If you can remember to be extra patient with them, then everyone in the family will have more fun!

So plan ahead, buy them a few new toys, keep your eyes out for a park and enjoy showing your kids the world!  It’s definitely more work to travel with kids but it’s also so rewarding to see the world through their eyes as they travel and discover things for the very first time!