Lifestyle with Abby Lane

Traveling with toddlers isn’t always an easy feat. We’ve done a decent amount of road trips with our toddlers (currently 3 and almost 2) and these are a few things that we have found to be helpful for maintaining everyone’s sanity and truly enjoying the trip!

1. Travel Specific Toys. We always have a bag of toys and fidgets that are specifically for travel (sometimes they are rotated out for restaurants too). This keeps them exciting because they don’t regularly play with them and they have choices over which toys they play with in the car vs. the hotel room. You can find some of our go-to toys here.
2. Plan Toddler Friendly Stops. Depending on how far your road trip is, finding toddler friendly stops along the way to get out and stretch your legs or get wiggles out before going to a hotel room is extremely helpful. Whether you locate a playground, children’s museum, splash pad, or just a nice walking trail; it’s good for everyone to stretch their legs and get out of the car.
3. Bring the Fun. One way I like to make sleeping at a hotel a little more fun and less scary is by wearing matching PJs. The boys love to see everyone matching and it can lighten up the bedtime mood. You don’t necessarily need to buy new matching PJs for trips either, you can do Christmas in July or Halloween- who cares! Other great ways to do this is to build a blanket fort, jump on the bed, pick the number of snacks out of the vending machine for their age (3 snacks for the 3 year old, etc).
4. Snacks. This one is pretty self-explanatory, especially with toddlers. Before a road trip I always try to do a big snack haul with some safe foods for our boys and some new and exciting ones (that I’m pretty certain they’ll like). I also always bring things to have a pre-breakfast snack because toddlers typically wake up extremely hungry and you can’t always rush down to the breakfast.
5. Bring the Comforts of Home. Having some routine and comforts from home can be so helpful. My boys both love their travel sound machine, travel fan, and blankets/stuffies from home. It helps maintain some of their bedtime routine, reduce their anxiety about sleeping in a different place, and their stuffies get to on an adventure! With this being said, we have learned that not being strict/anxious about bedtime is also very helpful- make it fun and don’t expect your toddlers to fall asleep at the same time they do at home. Sleeping in a a different place isn’t easy for adults, so why would we expect it to be different for them?