We recently took an 8 hour road trip with M. To entertain him we brought along a couple books, one toy cars and an iPad. If you have traveled a lot with a toddler you are probably laughing at our serious lack of toddler entertainment. Needless to say, we spent about 5 minutes on the books, 5 minutes on the toy and the remaining awake time watching shows on the iPad. I’m not opposed to letting M watch the iPad, but I love the idea of amusing him with more hands-on activities as well. In the future I think M will enjoy all the educational apps available, but at 17 months he isn’t quite ready for them. I’ve gathered a list of fun non-iPad ways to entertain a toddler in the car.
Side note: If you are an Apple user every Thursday the App store has a free app of the week. Most of the time the app is kid related. Even if your little one is too young for the app you should still download it then delete it from your device. Once the app has been downloaded it is stored in your purchase history so when your child is old enough you can download it again. Mr. Ice Cream and I have been downloading the free apps for years and now have quite a collection of great kid content for when M is old enough.
2. A Mini White Board – This blog post has tons of amazing ideas for road trip entertainment.
5. Toddler Travel Play Mat with Cars
6. Felt Chain
10. Calm Down Bottles – M loves the holding plastic water bottles. Now add glitter and color and he will be amused for hours.
What activities do you bring on car trips?
pear / 1881 posts
Awesome post! Thanks for the tip regarding the free app of the week (I didn’t know that!). I already put the reminder in my phone..
guest
Apple Music surprisingly worth every penny. I was prepared to give my toddler an iPad but decided to give Apple Music a try while driving for 6 h with my 2 and 4 yo. They enjoy music so much that they forgot to ask for iPad
GOLD / wonderful pomegranate / 28905 posts
Where do you find the free app? Is it only available for DL on Thursday or does it stay up longer?
pomegranate / 3401 posts
I just bought a magnadoodle for my 3 year old for car trips!
grapefruit / 4923 posts
we had an arsenal of goodies for when we took our then 20 month old on a 19-hour flight. his attention span just wasn’t long enough to sustain engagement with any activity for more than 15 minutes. i am still traumatized by those flights.
cherry / 174 posts
I love the idea of the calm down bottles. I have a feeling my 14 month old would love these. Thanks for the tip!
blogger / apricot / 250 posts
@regberadaisy: The free app is updated every Thursday and is available until the following Thursday.
When you go to the App store, scroll down about half way on the main page and there will be rectangular box that has the words “FREE APP OF THE WEEK” in the top left corner. Let me know if you still can’t find it.
kiwi / 511 posts
We do our car trip (9ish hours total; we break it up to about 5 hrs and 4 hrs with an overnight in the hotel). We will play a DVD so movies are an option.
I also bought the largest cookie sheet I could find at the dollar store and it is perfect to sit across the car seat arms, they use these trays so that they can put their coloring books on them and if we are having a snack they can put their snack on them. I did get the hard sandwich size box (again dollar store) to put the crayons in and they live in the car trip bin so I don’t have to go looking for them.
This year my 6 year old is obsessed with Connect Four so I bought the travel size edition. One of us can sit in the back between the two car seats so I think the tray will come in handy while we play that.
guest
I got some little containers in the travel section – I think they are for lotions and face cream for travel. I filled each with a tiny amount of snacks and it was entertaining for my toddler to open them, grab a few, then open another. And I could refill them when they were empty. This was for a plane trip so maybe a little messy in the car. I have heard you can use a pill box for the same idea. I also filled a bunch of ziplock baggies with random items – some feathers, isn’t paper clips, sticky notes. He lived sliding the ziploc to open it and the sticky notes were a huge hit.