Relief

     When traveling long distances with children, there are a few things that will be your saving grace. The first thing is snacks. Gummy fruit snacks, peanut butter crackers, juice boxes and the like. Nothing to shut a whining mouth as fast as a snack. And even better, a snack that involves sugar. You just have to decide if the immediate gratification is worth the aftermath later, though.

   Another wonderful distraction device is the portable DVD player. For without which, I don’t know where I’d be. My heart aches for all the wonderful Mothers who’ve traveled the country before me, DVD-less.  (And my heart literally breaks for the Pioneer women who traveled west in their wagons.) We originally had a single screen DVD player which was wonderful and fabulous. But now we have three children and one screen doesn’t reach all of them. So they fight, fight, fight! We decided that we’d gotten every single penny’s worth out of our single screen so investing in a dual screen wasn’t a bad idea. They were on saleat buy.com Ahhhhhh, sweet relief.  Now we have three screens in our van and I have to say — niiiice! Of course we don’t let them watch TV for every trip — just the ones longer than an hour or so. And we don’t let them watch it the entire time but it’s a great distraction!