My son, Benjamin, enjoying way too much ice cream on our beach vacation (which he did not eat all by himself)
For lots of families, summertime means vacation. My childhood vacations meant a trip to the Jersey Shore, all five of us (and sometimes even a couple friends, too) and our stuff crammed into our minivan. Most of our car rides were fairly uneventful, save your garden-variety sibling bickering, complaining about being too hot or too cold, whining about having to listen to “Prairie Home Companion” on the radio, and even occasional projectile vomiting thrown in to spice things up.
While the travel itself certainly wasn’t the best part of the trip, some of my best childhood memories were born on those beaches. I want my son Benjamin to have some of those same experiences of whiling away hours in the sand and surf, strolling along the boardwalk in search of hermit crabs and silly t-shirts, and eating way, way too much ice cream.
When my in-laws invited us to stay with them in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for a week, I jumped at the opportunity. It would be Benjamin’s first real beach experience, not counting the couple days we spent at Rehoboth Beach last year. I don’t count it because he had just turned one, slept most of the way there and back in the car, and did not care one bit for the beach.
As any parent knows, a whole lot changes in a year, and while I was excited for us to have our first full-fledged family vacation, I was petrified at the prospect of getting there. How would I keep a very active, very stubborn two-year-old busy for more than ten hours in the car when even a quick trip to Target is sometimes enough to initiate the ants in his pants?
Before we left for South Carolina, I took to Facebook to pick the collective brains of my mom friends for advice and tips. (Websites like Babble.com and Parenting.com are great resources, too!) Now that I’ve done a long trip with a toddler myself, I feel like I’ve earned another mommy merit badge. There really is no substitute for experience, but I hope these tips will make yours a little easier.
1. Pack well. It’s one thing to be an efficient packer of a vehicle, but fitting everything in isn’t useful if That One Thing You Need Right Now is buried in the back of the car. Books, toys, snacks, drinks, CDs and DVDs, tissues, and the like need to be safely within reach of either the kids or whoever is riding shotgun. Think about what your kids will need most often, and make the area around the front seat your command center. Don’t forget baby wipes and paper towels for quick clean-ups — kids are messy at any age.
2. Bring a mix of old and new toys. One of my friends gave me a great tip: Raid the Dollar Store and the dollar bins at Target for cheapo toys for the car. I did this and stuffed toys into brown paper lunch bags I’d decorated with markers and stickers. Every once in a while I’d pull out one of what I called Mommy’s Super-Awesome Secret Surprise Toy Bags and give it to Benjamin to tear into like it was Christmas morning. Books hold Benjamin’s attention more than anything, so I packed his favorites along with some new ones. A good pick for older kids is Crayola’s Color Wonder line of products, which includes markers that put color only on special paper — not all over your kids or your car.
3. Don’t skimp on snacks. A hungry kid is a cranky kid, but pack snacks that are easy (and safe) to eat, minimally messy and have at least some nutritional value. (Loading a kid up with tons of sugar only to stick her in a seat for hours at a time is probably not a great idea.) We brought along string cheese, apple slices, whole-grain snack bars, yogurt in a tube, Goldfish crackers, water in sippy cups and small boxes of 100% juice. We also packed these wonderful inventions that my son calls “squeezy fruit” by Ella’s Organics and HappyTot. They’re just pureed fruit and veggies in little pouches that kids can suck down themselves without even realizing they’re eating stuff that’s good for them.
4. Be prepared to stop — maybe a lot. Benjamin isn’t potty-trained yet (we’re working on it), but he is not a fan of sitting still for long periods of time. What was a ten-hour trip for my in-laws was a twelve-hour one for us. We left early in the morning, stopped for a sit-down breakfast a few hours into the trip and let Benjamin run around afterward in a little grassy area next to the restaurant. We stopped several more times after that so that he could burn off some steam, specifically seeking out rest areas that had picnic spots or other safe places for a little kid to run for a bit, look at bugs, pick up sticks and even gawk at a couple of chickens roaming free at the North Carolina visitors’ center. I did tire of the stops and wanted to just get to our destination already, but it worked well, considering my darling boy slept a grand total of 20 minutes in twelve hours. Yep. Twenty. Minutes.
5. When all else fails, pop in a DVD. It’s time to be honest. The snacks and books and smart packing and stops and chickens and CDs of kids’ songs were good. But what really entertained Benjamin on this trip (i.e., prevented a full-on, sleep-deprived meltdown of epic proportions that threatened at any moment) were DVDs of his two buddies Thomas and Dora. I hate this this is true, but it is. We don’t usually let Benjamin watch a lot of TV, but we also don’t usually hold him captive in a car for the better part of two days, either. I guess there’s a reason most minivans today come equipped with DVD players — and why nearly every single mom who weighed in on Facebook offered this exact same advice.
6. Stay calm — or at least try to. I decided to look at his entire trip as an adventure, and an adventure isn’t really an adventure without some pitfalls and drama, right? Right now, my son is sleeping soundly, and I can hear the sound of waves crashing and the rustling of the palms from our patio. It’s pretty perfect, but I certainly haven’t been as serene as this setting the entire trip — but I have tried really hard to not sweat the small stuff. Kids can sometimes be fussy and whiny and can forget to use their inside voices when you’re in a restaurant, but they’re kids. They also have an amazing ability to have fun and live in the moment, which is a lesson for all of us that we sometimes forget.
Yesterday as we walked hand in hand from the ocean to our beach chairs, Benjamin looked at me and proclaimed, “Mommy, I love the beach!” He was caked in sand from head to toe and drenched with sweat and sea water. At that moment, I didn’t see the inevitable bath and laundry that awaited us later — I saw only my son, and his sheer, unadulterated joy. Even though we’ve got the monster drive home awaiting us in a few more days, the trip has already been more than worth it.
By: Family Style columnist, Stephanie Anderson Witmer
