When my oldest son went off to preschool, he needed a backpack.  I liked the idea of the Lands’ End and L.L. Bean ones, but why would I pay five times the price of a Walmart backpack?  So I bought him a $5 Walmart backpack, and it wore out in March when of course Walmart didn’t have any backpacks to replace it with.  I repaired it with packing tape and my crappy primitive sewing skillz.

The next fall, for kindergarten, I bought another Walmart backpack, but this time I got the one that was more like $8 instead of the one that was around $5—going for quality, you see.  That one, too, ripped before the end of the school year.  It was very frustrating.

So when my aunt gave us a gift certificate to L.L. Bean, I used it to buy L.L. Bean Original Back Packs for both of my older boys:  one for Rob, who was then going into first grade, and one for William, who was starting 4-year-old preschool.
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Last summer I went on a car trip with a toddler and a newborn. Um, that was really fun! As you might imagine!

One thing that made a world of difference was the DVD player. Sweet, peaceful Steve bought us several happy hours during the day in the car, particularly toward the end of the day when traffic got bad and no one was in the mood for another car game or car song. I really, REALLY recommend an in-car DVD player of some sort (and a few fresh DVDs) if you are driving a long distance.

Toys for long trips are tricky. Ideally they should be hand-held, one-piece, non-messy, non-noisemaking, and long-entertaining. It’s hard to hit all those bases, but here are a few that came close.
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When I was a kid my mother and I lived in Virginia while my grandparents lived in Michigan, and every holiday we either visited them or they came to us. My grandmother used to say, “If Mohammed cannot come to the mountain, the mountain will come to Mohammed”. Then she would bow deeply, a gong would sound, and she would disappear in a cloud of smoke.

Not really, but that particular phrase makes it sound like she was all mystical and stuff, doesn’t it? She also had a saying about sitting in the corner and sucking on a mop, so obviously she was a woman of many fine colloquialisms.

Anyway, if you have small children I hope that the mountain is coming to your Mohammed during this week’s holiday, unless of course you enjoy traveling with small children, in which case may I suggest having an arterial blood gas test? YOU MAY BE DANGEROUSLY LOW ON OXYGEN.

Unfortunately, we have a road trip on the agenda, although on the plus side our destination is one of my favorite places ever. As I’ve been thinking ahead to what we need to pack and how many cups of juice one small boy can be expected to consume during a 6 hour drive (answer: as many as you will foolishly give him, until his diaper explodes with an heart-sinking kaplooey noise), I thought this might be a good time to review a few products that help make car travel with kids just a tiny bit more tolerable.

(Not reviewed: Benadryl, as I cannot with good conscience recommend this course of action, but I certainly know many parents who swear by the Dope ‘N Drive method.)

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