Road Trip Busy Bags

Sometimes I think I must be crazy. Road tripping with four kids. What are we thinking?!?! Honestly though, this is when some of our best memories are made.

I do like to be as prepared as possible for our road trips and I like to make sure the kids have something to keep them busy in the car. I also like to make sure I’m not turning around one thousand times passing things to various children in seats behind me.

One of my most popular posts to date was this post.

Well the boys are a little too old for those travel boxes now so I thought I would try a similar but fresh approach for our latest road trip.

Road Trip Busy Bags…

These were a huge hit! The first leg of our journey was about a five hour drive and despite the fact that their kindles were sitting next to them they stayed busy with the contents of these bags for the entire ride. They did not reach for their screens once during the drive. I was shocked. They were entertained for far longer than I thought they would be. Even the big kids appreciated their busy bags.

The minute I decided I was going to make these Road Trip Busy Bags for the kids I turned to my favorite place to buy novelty toys in bulk… Oriental Trading Company. (Who by the way, graciously provided us with much of the contents of these bags).  Having four kids to make bags for this was the most economical way for me to approach it. They had tons to choose from.

Along with a handful of items I found in dollar bins throughout the summer we filled our bags with :

• Fidget Spinners
• They’re favorite items, various finger puppets.
• Magic springs
• Kazoo’s
• If your doing any night driving anything that glows is fun. I put in these finger lights.
• I also threw in markers, pencils, blank notebooks & putty.

The tote bags we used are here.

These bags were full! Faces lit up when I handed them their Road Trip Busy Bags. I will without a doubt be putting bags together for any road trip we take in the future!

Tips for making your Road Trip Busy Bags as successful & as entertaining as possible.

• The first & main tip is don’t involve the kids in making these bags. As tempting as it was for me to want them to be involved in the choosing of items to go in their bags, there is  something to be said for the element of surprise. The first bit of our drive the kids were entertained by just discovering and sharing with each other what was in their bags. If they had already known what they were getting that fun would have been lost.
• Add snacks to the bag. It gave them that much more to discover and let them manage their snacks ( at least for the first part of our trip).
• Choose a fun reusable bag. The kids lugged these tote bags various places on our vacation so the bags themselves were really multipurpose. We took them to the beach to put shells in. To the boardwalk to collect our winnings.  I actually had them decorate their bags a couple of days before the trip and they thought that in itself was the treat. They had no idea I was going to fill them for the ride. They just thought they had these new cool tote bags for the trip.
• Throw in a few things they can use when you reach your destination. I included some rubber ducks for their baths (here) and some foam airplanes & paddle ball games that came as part of this assortment.
• Lastly don’t give them the bags until they are all settled in the car. That probably goes without saying but the motivation of getting their back once they were all loaded and buckled in did help us get out of the house just a little bit faster.