Make travelling with children enjoyable

You're planning a long trip and the children will be going. Maybe it's a visit to your sister or a summer vacation. You know you will have a good time when you get there but the car ride, well that's a different story. You've done it before and the memories... Well let's just say you survived.

You're already beginning to picture the scene. The whining and fidgeting soon turn to arguing and other childish pranks. At first you shrug it off but soon you are ready to scream. Everybody is upset.

The top complaints were:

20 of "are we there yet"

18 of "he hit me again."

9 of "I'm hungry"

13 of "there's nothing to do"

If only there were something they could focus on for a while! A little entertainment would work. A portable television might work but there are lots of dead spots along the way. Songs will work but they are too short to keep the young attentions for this many hour journey and reading books just isn't practical on the bumpy roads.

I've got a better solution for you. Find yourself a cd player or even better a mp3 player like an iPod or the like. In late 2006 a SansDisk 2 Gigabyte player cost only 80 dollars. That's what I'm using. I've seen ads for some players as low as ten dollars. Be sure to bring this with you after you do the following:

1. Find a site on the web that sells audiobooks that you can download.

2. Select some good titles and load them to your computer.

3. Grab you mp3 player and plug it into the computer

4. Using a music player, select and sync the audiobooks to the mp3 player.

Some audiobooks are 10 hours or more in length. Now I know that most people will not listen to them straight through, and children's attention spans do have limits. That's okay. Actually there are lots of shorter audiobooks. Dramatizations of books may be just an hour or two. Take however much quiet time you can get and enjoy the relative calm.

This is what may just happen. Imagine getting to your destination while the kids are in the middle of an exciting adventure story. You may be hearing something like, "Can you drive a little farther, I'm not quite done yet." You get to decide whether to honor their request or just wait for the trip home.

You get out of the car and realize, this was much better than before. Arriving with a positive attitude makes things so much more enjoyable.

If you're thinking, "It won't work for me," then consider this. Will you really know until you've tried it? Imagine the difference it could make. A fully dramatized version of "Treasure Island" would be a safe bet with which to begin.

Article Source: http://www.lifestyle-information-services.com

This article is written by Daniel Brown, the father of two active boys. He also runs a downloadable audiobook store where you can download children's audiobooks. ~ai601
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