Hitting the road

Jerel is the designated driver on our journeys to Utah.  And on all other journeys.  Jerel does all the driving for the same reason he does all the cooking--he can't stand the way I do it.  I think I've driven with him as a passenger just twice in our married life--both times when we were test driving cars.  Oh wait, and also when I took him to the hospital with his broken arm.  But other than that he's always in the drivers seat.  Which is just fine by me because it leaves me in the crocheters seat!  I love having something to keep my hands busy while we drive and it makes the time pass so much more quickly.

 This time I was the cool mom with lots of activities for the kids to do on the drive.  As usual, my attempts at being the cool mom were a failure.  But there were a few things that did keep the kids busy for more than 3 minutes.  Zay has used pattern blocks at preschool and loved them, so I picked up a set of magnetic ones along with a cake pan from Dollar Tree for them to play with.  They had fun making patterns and pictures, and having me make patterns for them too.

The memory game was also sort of a flop.  I forgot to
factor in that it would require my two kids to actually
cooperate...

 Next we had a sticker matching activity.  I bought two little notebooks along with a few sets of stickers (2 sets of each kind).  Then I put one set of the stickers in the book, and the kids' job was to find the matching sticker on the sticker sheets and put it next to the correct one in the book.  They really liked it and it kept them busy for a while.  But Isaiah made a few mistakes and got too frustrated to keep trying.  They didn't want to do it again later on.  So basically I spent more time putting stickers in the books to prep them than the kids spent actually using them.  A flop for us.

The beading activity actually went over pretty well.  They both had at least 5 bracelets by the time we got to grandma's house.

I brought a post-it note pad for each of the kids.  They got to draw on the sheets and then put them all over the place to make their own art gallery.  They liked it, it's just that I pictured each of these activities lasting like 45 minutes instead of the real-life 4.5 minutes.  So there was still plenty of movie watching.  Jerel and I could probably quote the entire classic My Little Pony movie.  And the Lego movie.

The best car trip activity ever: