My friend Heather is moving across the entire country with children aged almost-3 and almost-5. If I were her I would say that as “ages 2 and 4,” to maximize the Pity Factor.

She is looking for ideas to keep the children entertained on the trip. If your first suggestion is “OMG don’t do it at all! Fly instead!! With the children in animal crates!!” you can save your breath because I already tried it. They will be in the car at least six days, and that is final.

I suggest we see if we can make this easier for her in any way. Donations of prescription medications would be excellent too, but I was thinking more along the lines of travel tips and toy ideas.

My tip, based on taking two much-shorter trips (1.5-days in the car each trip) with a 2-year-old and a newborn, is to plan to stop at places that have a play area or a grassy run-around area, and include in estimated trip time the amount of time it would take for the kids to run/play/climb for 15 minutes or so at each stop. Plus assume triple the number of stops needed with adults. This makes the entire trip take much, much longer.

My second tip is to save some stuff aside and not bring out everything on the first day of travel, or else the children will play frantically with all the toys on the first day and be bored for the rest of the trip. (This is a pointless tip, because if it were me, I’d be desperate enough on the first day to bring out anything, ANYTHING I had.)

Now for things to buy:

1. Fresh TV/movies. Heather tells me that they already have a DVD player for the car, so I suggest buying several new DVDs. …This doesn’t seem like it’s brilliant enough to suggest, but that didn’t stop me from suggesting the kids could run around at rest stops. Blue’s Clues (photo from Amazon.com) is one of the ones I got for the just-turned-2-year-old on my own trip, so it may be too young for the 2- and 4-year-olds—but anything, ANYTHING they would like that wouldn’t be intolerable for the adults.

2. Water-drawing thingie. The H-2 Whoa is the one we had. It’s two-sided, so by the time you finish drawing on the second side, the first side is mostly dry and ready to use again. But if I were buying now, I’d buy the travel-sized Aqua Doodle (photo from Amazon.com). (In fact, I DID buy it, and we still keep it in our car. I like it less because it has pre-printed rainbows/grass on it, which can kind of ruin an outer space drawing. But it IS more sensibly compact.)
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For Mother’s Day this year, Paul is taking all five kids out of the house for most of the day. I’m…not sure I can find a single thing to complain about there. I plan to buy a box of chocolates and/or a pint of ice cream ahead of time, and spend the day reading and/or watching TV. Then I’ll go to Wendy’s for lunch. Maybe bring the food home with me, just so I can eat the fries with the maximum awareness of not sharing them with anyone.

Perhaps you are not expecting such a nice Mother’s Day yourself? My boss is looking out for you: she’s giving away a $25 Amazon.com gift card to one commenter on this post. You don’t have to comment anything in particular, though of course we all enjoy reading stories of past outrages and disappointments! They don’t even have to be your OWN stories, if a friend of yours had a particularly good-story one. Come on, spill it.

In the meantime, many of us have a little shopping to do for our own mothers.

My own mother greatly enjoyed The Cazalet Chronicles, a series of four books by Elizabeth Jane Howard. (Photo from Amazon.com.) The Light Years (careful: there are a bunch of other books with the same name) is first, followed by Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off. The first thing you’ll likely notice is that some of the books are unusually EXPENSIVE for paperbacks. Well, perhaps it wouldn’t be wise to buy all four right of the bat anyway, until you know if your mom likes them. Get just the first one and see. Or maybe the first TWO, since the second one is the cheapest of all four.
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For Henry, age 4: Knight and Dragon 36-piece puzzle (photo from Amazon.com). Note that the box is (1) cute, (2) an impractical but fun shape, and (3) not a match to the puzzle. Whatever, I like it and it has the right number of pieces and he loves knights.

Melissa and Doug Pirate Costume (photo from Amazon.com). My parents are giving Henry this. We have the Knight Costume, and it was so much better-quality and more awesome than I’d expected. (I’d been picturing a Halloween costume, made of thin icky material that tears after one use. BUT NO: it’s like what you’d find in a classroom dress-up box.)
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Oh, man. William has been invited to a birthday party this weekend. Furthermore, he got the invitation yesterday, which means there is not much time to think. And William is the sort of child who, if you ask him what his BEST FRIEND SINCE FIRST GRADE’s favorite color is, will say “……Humm. Maybe….blue?” And if you say, “Well, what does she like to do? Does she have any hobbies?,” will say “…..Humm. Uh….” So on the topic of this weekend’s birthday child, a classmate he has known only since school started this year, I feel very lucky that he happened to know whether the child was a boy or a girl.

And eleven is a tricky age to buy for. I don’t even know what to get my OWN children in that age range. Well, there is nothing for it but to dig up some candidates, which is something I had to do before Christmas anyway.

Crafting With Cat Hair (photo from Amazon.com). I realize this is odd. I realize this is the sort of item that may need some further explanation, or perhaps would have been better suited to the unusual miscellany list from last week.
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Oh, good, school’s out. No more lunch-making, bus-catching, homework-nagging. Now we turn our attention to scrabbling for ways to alleviate boredom.

Orb Factory Sticky Mosaics (photos from Amazon.com). Beth recommended the sticky mosaics, and I got the jewels one for Elizabeth for her birthday. Not only does Elizabeth totally love it, _I_ totally love it. I don’t usually like to do projects with children, but we’re on our fourth mosaic and I’m still having to prevent myself from working on it after she goes to bed. I bought the dinosaur set for ME to do (I’ll use the resulting pictures to decorate the room of dinosaur-loving Henry), and I can’t wait for it to arrive.  I wish they made sets for grown-ups.

They’re not CHEAP, it’s true:  about $17 for a box that includes 4 or 5 mosaics.  But after hesitating over the first set, I wouldn’t hesitate again:  well worth it for the fun, the fine motor skills development, the finished pictures (the three we’ve done so far are all on Elizabeth’s wall), and the project I LIKE doing with a child. If they sold them individually instead, for $3-4 each, I’d probably put one in my cart every time I went to the store.

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I have always been scared of having to take my kids on a plane. We’ve never done it, because our family is close enough to visit by car, and every time I fly on my own I surreptitiously stare at other parents trying to manage small kids and strollers and bags and think to myself, oh thank GOD that’s not me.

The time has come, however, for me to nut up and face my fears, because I have the opportunity to take my 3.5-year-old on a trip to Washington DC at the end of this month. It will be just the two of us, and I am both thrilled about the adventure and, um, COMPLETELY FREAKED OUT.

We’ve been talking a lot about the trip and watching YouTube videos of planes taking off and so on; I feel like I’m doing an okay job on preparing him as best I can. He’s super excited about everything, but I know the fickle nature of a preschooler: it’s inevitable there will be some challenges along the way. So, what sorts of gear can help make it all a little easier? I’m hoping you guys can help me out, especially those of you with experience traveling with children. Here are some items I’m looking at:
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Do you realize that Christmas Eve is one week from today?  I’m making a list of gifts that have been given to ME in the past year, gifts that were a success and that you might want to consider buying for someone on your list.

My brother and sister-in-law gave me several pairs of earrings from the Etsy shop Kneehighs-n-Pigtails, and I LOVE them.  They’re so classy and dressy if you’re looking classy and dressy, but they look chic and awesome with t-shirt and jeans, too.
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I am not saying that good things don’t come in small packages, because of COURSE they do.  But sometimes a $20 CD can look, well, smaller than $20.  And sometimes a $20 throw blanket can look bigger than $20.

If you’re cutting down on gift spending this year, you might want to get more bang for your buck, as it were, by saving yourself money—and also giving the recipient a way to save some money themselves.  Or you might be trying to snow your in-laws into thinking you spent more than you did.  I’m not going to look too closely at your motivations, I’m just going to give you some big-looking, small-costing ideas that happen to go along with all the things people say they’re doing to save money these days.
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I’ve been listening to my iPod on shuffle recently and it’s been unexpectedly enjoyable — I keep hearing music I haven’t played in years, and as I drive to and from work I drift in and out of these nostalgic fugues. Music can make you remember a certain moment or time period in such a visceral way, don’t you think? Like how a certain smell will bring you back to a specific moment more intensely that your memory alone ever could.

Here are some albums that are both meaningful to me and awesome, in case you’re looking for new (well, old, but you know) tunes. I’m hoping you’ll tell me your memory-triggering albums/songs, too.
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If you like pink, October is a good time to shop:  a lot of pink stuff is available for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  If you’re like me, you like supporting that cause and also really like the way it justifies a purchase.

Coffee-Mate is offering a pink mug for $12.95; $5.00 is donated.
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