Long drives, long visits — what we'd pack

Three activities this week, one for each age band, all of them built to survive a car or a plane. Plus a tip for the first night in an unfamiliar bedroom, and a box worth mailing before the visit. (Backyard camping is next week.) Start with whatever age is coming.

Press a suction toy onto whatever flat surface is in front of the baby — the airplane tray, the car window beside the seat, the high-chair tray wherever you land. Let him bat it, spin it, and mouth it. Your only job is the occasional re-press when the suction gives.

A toy that stays put is a completely different experience from one that hits the floor and vanishes under the seat every ninety seconds. That is the whole problem with travel toys at this age. It holds in stretches of ten to thirty minutes, and there’s nothing to clean up after.

Everything here depends on the toy actually staying stuck. We’d pack the Sassy Fishy Fascination Station, around $24 on Amazon and made for 6 months and up. The wheel pops off the base into a handheld rattle, which covers the stretch when he’d rather hold it than spin it.

Fill a brush pen with water and hand it over. As your grandchild paints across a blank page, the color comes up under the wet strokes. When the page dries, it goes blank again and they start over.

Color appearing out of plain water holds a four-year-old through a surprising stretch of highway, and because it’s only water, there is nothing to spill on a car seat. Figure twenty to forty minutes a sitting, with about eight minutes for a page to reset. No cleanup.

The pen stores inside the cover, which is the difference between one thing to keep track of and a loose brush rolling somewhere under the seat. Melissa & Doug’s On the Go Water Wow pads run about $19 on Amazon for three, for ages 3 and up. Each page resets as it dries, so one pad is a fresh activity three or four times on the same drive.

Give each grandchild a notebook and a running list of things to spot out the window — out-of-state plates, water towers, a red barn, a particular road sign. They check off what they see as you drive. At every stop, they jot or sketch one thing: the diner, the roadside statue, the best snack of the day.

The hunt keeps their eyes up and out the window instead of down and bored. The log turns the dull middle of a trip into something they’re documenting rather than enduring, and kids come back to it on their own. “Who spots it first” runs itself.

A spiral notebook and a list you wrote at the kitchen table does this fine; what it can’t supply is a new idea at hour two. That’s the Happy Fox Road Trip Activities and Travel Journal — 100-plus prompts, about $7.50 on Amazon, ages 7 and up. The paperback binding loosens with heavy use, so a binder isn’t a bad idea if it’s going to get worked over.

The hardest part of a long visit with a toddler is usually the first night in a room that isn't hers. The instinct is to make bedtime a little better than it is at home — an extra book, a longer cuddle, the warm grandparent version. The common advice runs the other way: keep it identical, right down to the words. The sameness is the thing doing the work, not the warmth. So before the visit, ask her parents to walk you through the whole sequence start to finish. Bath or no bath, which book, the order it goes in. The exact phrase at lights-out. Where the sound machine sits and how loud. Write it down. Run it in that order the first few nights, whether they're staying with you or you're staying with them.

Mail a small box to land about a week before you see them. Three things go in it. A paper countdown chain — construction paper strips looped and taped, one to tear off each day until the visit. A printed photo of the exact spot where the child will sleep at your house, with a paper "[Name]'s room" sign taped to the door in the shot. And half of an activity you'll finish on day one: something like a sticker book, mailed without its stickers. The pages arrive empty; the sticker sheet waits at your house. The countdown does the waiting. The photo makes a strange room familiar before they walk into it. The split activity means the first hour together already has a plan in it.

Know a grandparent with a visit on the calendar and a lot of miles in between? Forward this their way. →