Travelling With Baby

My husband Dan and I are veterans of long car trips with the preschool set, having made numerous such trips with our sons Julian and Eliot. There certainly have been moments — like the time I dispensed the last cookie and Julian intoned, "I want a cookie," over and over as we crawled across the Golden Gate Bridge in weekend traffic — when I wonder aloud, "What are we doing?"

And then we do it again, mostly because we have so much fun at our destinations that the trouble of getting there is forgotten. We've also figured out ways to make the journey not only tolerable but enjoyable. Here are suggestions for surviving any trip longer than two hours:

• Get real. Avoid taking 2- to 4-year-olds on the road more than six hours a day. Most young children are not able to put up with the long hours of confinement to a car seat. And you'll be worn out by the relentless task of diverting children who haven't yet mastered the art of self-entertainment.
• Plan ahead. A week before your departure, list everything you'll need to take and start gathering it right away. If you can, take off from work at least a half-day before you leave to give yourself more time to pack. If you have more than one child, consider renting a minivan (reserve well in advance, especially during the summer). You won't waste time trying to fit that 10-pound bag of charcoal briquettes into the trunk, and you'll have more flexibility about where everyone sits. To maximize your seating options, take your own car seats with you, even if you get a van with those nifty built-ins. Little heinies can get sore when they're in one seat for too long, and it's great to be able to pull over at a rest stop and let the children switch.
• Get enough sleep the night before. While it's good for the children to be well rested before the trip, it's imperative that you be. Sleep deprivation makes for frazzled nerves and unsafe driving.
• Plan your travel time around your child's sleep schedule. Our ideal departure time is 11:30 a.m. We hit the road, give the kids lunch in the car (which delays by about half an hour the need to launch the formal entertainment program), distribute their blankies, then book it while they're sleeping during their regular nap time. We never stop the car while a child is sleeping; it's a sure waker-upper. Some people travel at their children's bedtime: They put the pajama-clad kids in their car seats, then set off. This works if you're not too tired to drive late at night, and if you're reasonably sure your children will stay asleep once you arrive. (We tried this and ended up with a wide-awake toddler at midnight.)
• Relax about snacks. We have two rules about eating on the road: First, take way more snacks and drinks than you think you need. And second, let the usual rules about junk food slide. One day on a mega-sugar, ultra-salt, empty-calories diet will not a junk-food addict make, and that extra cookie might buy you 15 minutes of peace. Our favorite car snacks: popular packaged lunches (the kids love the little plastic trays with crackers, cheese, and turkey rounds), rice cakes, pretzels, bagels, sandwiches, string cheese, apple slices, bananas, granola bars, cookies. What doesn't work: most fruit (too messy for this age group), yogurt (ditto, plus you need a spoon), juice boxes (one squeeze and they spill all over the car seat — take spillproof sippy cups instead). Don't forget to pack snacks for the adults, too.
• Take an entertainment bag. I spend more time and thought on this item than on any other. How elaborate your entertainment bag is depends on the length of your trip, how many children you've got to entertain, and their ages and attention spans. Here's what I put in ours: books, both old favorites and new ones; small toys, also both old and new; music and story tapes (our favorites include David Hyde Pierce reading If You Give a Pig a Pancake and Robin Williams taking hilarious (G-rated) liberties with Pecos Bill); and art supplies (markers make a huge mess with the under-3 set, so stick with crayons). Throw in a cheap 9" x 12" baking sheet for each child to use as a playing surface so crayons and Matchbox cars and Legos don't roll and slide away. (Repeatedly retrieving dropped toys gets old really quickly.)
• I also keep a trip notebook for each child in which they can draw or place stickers en route; later I inscribe a few notes about the trip. Also great for inclusion in these notebooks are the instant 1" x 1" photo stickers made by those zippy little "I-Zone" cameras. You can really burn some rubber while the children wait for their photos to develop.
• Divvy up the driver/social director tasks. In my family this is easy. My husband is prone to motion sickness, so he does all the driving; I do all the snack distribution, storytelling, and toy rotating. Some parents prefer to switch duties during the course of the trip. If you have space, the kids love having a grown-up sit for a while in the backseat with them.
• Keep the peace. Well-fed, well-rested children with toys to play with are less apt to fight with each other in the car. Putting siblings in separate rows of a van for a leg of the drive can also help. Don't expect very young children to share; make sure there are enough diversions for each of them. If they're still squabbling, suggest stopping the car. (Kids hate this.) Or do something surprising, such as turning the radio on very loud for a minute, blowing bubbles in their direction, or — as a desperate friend of mine once did — even squirting them gently with a water pistol.
• Stop. You can't do it in a plane or on a train, so take advantage of the fact that with a car you can pull over and get out. We've turned stopping into a ritual on some of our repeat car trips. Whenever we visit Dan's sister in Reno we stop at the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento on the way. It adds two hours to the trip but is well worth it. Doing something fun along the way makes the car trip an end in itself, not just something to be endured. We also listen to our children and stop when they need to. Once we pulled over at a rest stop two miles from our destination because Julian, age 2 at the time, could not deal with being car-bound another minute. He was perfectly happy to ride the rest of the way once he'd spent half an hour running around.
• The whole point of family vacations is to have unencumbered time with your children, right? Let that mindset begin when you pull out of your garage, and you may find yourself with wonderful memories, not just of the destinations but of the car trips that got you there.

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