Traveling with Kids

We take several road-trips a year. Figuring out how to keep the kids entertained has always been one of my favorite parts of the trip. (I'm serious! I love thinking of ways to make it fun for them.)

Someone posted recently on one of the forums I frequent asking for ideas for traveling with young kids. She had a DVD player but wanted to use it sparingly. She got lots of good suggestions about things to take along... coloring books, audio stories, suprises from the dollar store, special snacks...

Another good suggestion was to stop frequently at interesting places along the way. We love to do that when we are on vacation, but we often travel for business and can't take the time to stop "just for fun." So here's a tip I shared that came in handy especially when our kids were younger and we needed to keep moving:

We usually eat at fast-food places as we travel and we buy "happy meals" for the kids (even though we don't always ordinarily), so they got a new toy every day or even a couple times a day. Each kid had an "activity bag" (a small tote or one of those small diaper bags) in the back seat with them, and they enjoyed collecting their happy meal toys in their bags. If the restaurant will cooperate I usually try to get them to give each child something different, so they can swap toys when they get tired of their own.

We always tried to find the fast-food restaurants with playgrounds. We let the children play while we ate and took their happy meals "to go". That gave us a short break from needing to entertain them, ran off some of their energy, and gave them something to do (eat!) when they got back in the car.

And that's my tip for this week's Works-for-Me-Wednesday!

Menu Plan Monday

Hey, the menu plan for last week actually worked out! We didn't end up eating the scheduled meals on the scheduled days, but so what? It was great to have the list to refer to throughout the week, and we did end up eating all the meals I planned, just not on the days I had planned.
I know it's not as detailed as some, but just having the main dish for supper planned ahead of time is a big help.

Here is my plan for this week's:



Monday: ham and beans, cornbread
Tuesday: rice and sausage casserole
Wednesday: pizza
Thursday: meatloaf and fixin's
Friday: grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup
Saturday: pasta dish, green beans
Sunday: chicken supreme, rice, green salad

Click on the "Menu Planning Monday" banner for a list of more blogs that are participating in this theme today!

Sweater

I finally finished this sweater that I started last winter. Turned out cute, I thought!

I'm nearly finished with the shawl I'm working on, too. I'm crocheting the fringe on it.
There's still plenty of that yarn left. It was a huge skein!
I want to try copying a pretty pineapple-pattern crocheted scarf I was given. I'll see how the Rainbow Boucle yarn works for that.

Idaho State Quarter

Is this not the ugliest state quarter yet? I am so disappointed! Here we waited all these years for "our" state's quarter to come out and this is what it looks like! (It's due out this summer. I just saw the design for the first time yesterday.) Idaho is truly a beautiful state. It could have been such a pretty design. This is just blah. The Peregrine Falcon is not even the Idaho state bird, fer cryin' out loud! The mountain blue bird would have been prettier than this.

Oh, well. At least they didn't feature the "famous potatoes". That would have been truly mortifying!

Dried Rose Petals

My husband bought me a dozen roses of mixed colors for our anniversary last fall. They were so pretty and smelled so sweet, that I hated to see them begin to drop their petals after a few days.
I decided to dry the petals to save, but I wasn't sure what I would do with them. Dried rose petals don't have a very strong fragrance and in fact just smell kinda dusty. Then I had a bright idea! I bought rose-scented potpourri oil (available at WalMart in the floral department for $2 or $3) and sprinkled them with that. Voila! Rose potpourri that actually smells good! So I'm still enjoying my anniversary roses all these months later.

I decided to share this idea this week for the benefit of any of you that may have received roses for Valentine's Day, on my very first post for: