Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Cruise Director Julie at your service . . .

Yup, I pulled out a Love Boat reference to share about planning our week of family fun.  For the last two weeks I have been planning our family trip to Colorado, the Grand Canyon, Arches and Zion.  Seriously, there’s a reason that people get paid to be travel agents.  Of course, in true Heather style I decided that I’m going to do what I can to minimize the DVD time in the car.  So, I had to come up with all the games and surprises for the girls. 

Over the next several days you can take our journey with us and laugh (hopefully with us and not at us) along the way!

Here’s what I learned about being the family travel agent:

1) No matter how much you talk about it beforehand (and how much you justify all the savings and fun activities you can do for the same price), your husband will always disagree with your lodging suggestions if they don’t begin with “Motel” and end with “6”. 

2) Your husband really doesn’t believe that family fun in the car is going to work, and just to make his point, he will spend $35 on brand new DVD’s that the kids just can’t resist.  So, here’s a suggestion, pull out the big guns . . . I’m thinking lots of sugar could do the trick.  No, wait . . . you have to actually be in a confined space with these children for 8 hours at a time.  You’re just going to have to stick to old fashioned bribery using toys, markers and anything else that might work.

3) You can actually spend as much on buying crap for the 4 day car trip as you would have spent on a plane ticket, so you may want to reconsider whether car trip was the best way to go.  I’m hoping my husband doesn’t see the Target and Michaels charges.
Week's worth of entertainment for 3!
But, just in case you are crazy like me, here are some fun ideas that I’m doing for our trip.  I’ll let you know along the way if they actually work.:

1) Ego and Superego are coming back from summer camp.  So I printed out some summer camp pages from the Disney Family Fun website and I’m going to print their photos at a one hour photo place so they can have them in the car to start their scrapbooks while it’s still fresh.

2) Surprise Balls (get your minds out of the gutter – oh, wait, maybe that’s just me).  This was another idea from Disney family fun – you put messages in tin foil balls and periodically you throw them at the children.  Depending on how far into the trip you are, the balls may be thrown harder than other times.  Nonetheless, here are some of the fun activities in our “surprise balls”.
            a. Glow in the dark party – give them each a package of those glow sticks and challenge them to be creative with the shapes they make.
Surprise Balls!  :)
            b. Pipe cleaner party – give them some pipe cleaners, foam balls, googly eyes, etc. and have them make the most creative things they can.
            c. Ice Cream Break – stop along the road at the next available ice cream stand
            d. Brake for Bubbles – stop the car at the next exit and everyone gets to get out and blow bubbles for fifteen minutes to blow off some steam.
            e. Grab Bag – they get to choose a grab bag treat.
            f. Movie wars – whoever gets their ball opened fastest gets to choose the next DVD.

3) Mazes – I’m printing out several mazes for them to do.

4) Old fashioned car games – oh yes, I’m pulling out the license plate game, cootie catcher as well as a few new ones that I learned from www.momsminivan.com, which is a great resource.

5) Margaritas – for you, not the kids (or your husband who’s driving for that matter).  Just slip a few of those in every once in a while and you’ll survive this craziness you created for yourself.

Let me know if you’ve got any suggestions, and if feasible, we’ll try them along the way and let you know how they turn out.

Oh, and don’t forget . . . July 17th is National Ice Cream Day.  Enjoy a good old fashioned American treat on Sunday.

Oh, and Friends, I figured out how to respond to comments!  I’m so excited I can do that now.  So, please comment if you think of it!

And finally, at the bottom of the blog I have community questions that I’d love your input on.  Please share!

1 comment:

  1. I love the mystery balls idea, but I'm worried that my kids might throw them back at me. One thing that works for us is listening to books on tape. It helps when it's a series, so they'll be excited about the next book. We usually stock up from the library and download them to iTunes, but you can go to audible.com to get them.

    For all of you with boys (which I have 2) - instead of bubbles, I bought water guns and we'd have a family water fight at the rest stops. Great for those hot days.

    Have a great time Heather!

    ReplyDelete