What We Learned On Our First Family Road Trip…
When life hands you lemons, its best to try and make lemonade. This summer my husband’s grandfather passed away. We live in Texas and the funeral was in Tennessee. Our options were to fly as a family which would be extremely expensive for last minute tickets, for my husband to go by himself, or to take our first family road trip. We decided to do the road trip.
Now, we were by no means prepared for a trip like this. Bubba had never been in a car longer than maybe an hour and this trip was going to be about 16 hours according to google, and that’s with no stops. One of the major benefits of my day job is that my team was really understanding and flexible with what I needed and gave me a lot of space to do what I needed to do for my family. Still, between work obligations and the last-minute nature of this trip we had to make the trip there in one day to get there in time for all the funeral events.
Preparing for the trip
As soon as it was decided we were going to drive I jumped into preparation mode. One of the advantages to driving meant we didn’t have to be as choosy with the baby items we brought with us. So, I ended up bring half the house with us… Now that we’ve been through the trip I can confidently say what I thought we needed, what ended up not being necessary, and what we were missing.
Things we brought that were necessary
The sleep sack and sound machine. These items were essential to keeping his sleep routine somewhat intact. The hotel was much noisier than our house, so the sound machine was definetly key.
The stroller. Now you may be thinking well this one is obvious… I had to fight my husband on this one. He didn’t want to bring it; it takes up a lot of the trunk space, but it was definetly necessary. One day we ended up using it almost all day and he turned to me and just “… ok you were right” and just smiled and nodded like uhhhh duh.
Things I wish we brought
A highchair. We did not think to bring his highchair and for us this was a BIG mistake. He will not eat food outside of the highchair unless its puffs. Also, since we were in other people’s homes I didn’t want to let him make a huge mess, so his meals were very hit and miss. Thankfully he still breastfeeds, but it definetly set back out weaning and feeding habits. The frustrating part is that his normal highchair is a small portable one. When we got home I ordered this super portable one [https://amzn.to/3zKuDBE] to keep in my car so we never had to worry about it again.
The pack n play. We haven’t used the pack in play in months, but it would have been nice to have a safe place to put him down for naps. We only ended up being at the hotel for 1 nap the entire time so the other two days when the nap didn’t happen during our travel time I just had to hold him.
Things we brought we didn’t use
Nothing. Okay I’m being cheeky here. But really we didn’t bring a single thing we didn’t end up using. Now we are lucky because we have a pretty easy-going kid so as long as he had mama he was pretty okay with the whole trip. Kids don’t really need much and most of what we brought was really just to make our lives easier. Could he have slept without the sound machine, yeah probably. Would he have been perfectly happy playing with non-toys yeah. Set him down and hand him a coaster and a shoe and he can entertain himself fairly well.
The real essentials were clean clothes, plenty of diapers and wipes, and familiar snacks. We weren’t going to a third would country so push come to shove we could have bought anything else we really needed. Honestly the hardest part of the trip was that after a while he was just sick of the car seat and getting in and out of the car, but we’ll talk about my tips for road tripping with a baby/toddler in another post.
