{"id":1347,"date":"2018-06-20T09:33:46","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T14:33:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/?p=1347"},"modified":"2018-06-20T09:35:10","modified_gmt":"2018-06-20T14:35:10","slug":"road-warriors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/?p=1347","title":{"rendered":"Road Warriors"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>8 days, 13 states, and 4,237 miles. That’s how we road trip.<\/p>\n

Our spring break schedules lined up this year. All four kids were out of school at the same time, and we had all four kids for the entire week of spring break. When I received an invitation to give a talk at Montana State University in Bozeman right in the middle of spring break, Emily and I decided we would make a family road trip out of it. We sketched out a route, booked some Airbnbs, rented a vehicle big enough for the six of us, packed wisely, and the morning after closing on our new house, we hit the road!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I’ll share highlights from our itinerary, but first I want to say how proud I am of our road warriors. Our four kids love road trips, and they love exploring. And we made it the entire trip without screens!<\/strong> The teenager got to spend 15 minutes on Instagram on my phone each night, but otherwise, the kids were screen-free the whole time. I wasn’t sure we could pull it off (and the 10-year-old was deeply skeptical), but with some careful planning, we did. Since other parents seemed slightly amazed at this feat, I thought I would share our strategies.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The older kids and I played the license plate game–competitively–the whole time. I think we each picked up 40-something states and a few Canadian provinces, and I spotted a Cherokee Nations plate. The 10-year-old and the 14-year-old also spent a fair amount of car time scrapbooking the trip, writing and drawing about the things they saw, which was really great because it helped them pay attention to all the new sights and activities. We listened to a lot of podcasts, including both seasons of Mars Patel<\/a><\/em> and a really fascinating How Stuff Works<\/a><\/em> episode about Lewis and Clark, whose trail we crossed several times on the trip. We played an inspired round of StoryCubes, which the teenager later illustrated. And we had a impromptu puppet theater late one night in North Dakota, with the two older kids cracking the little ones up with their versions of fractured fairly tales.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A lot of credit, however, goes to my lovely wife, who knows how to do a road trip. Before we left, she went to Five Below and picked up some fun things for the kids to do on the trip. She got four of everything, and put them in individual gift bags. At some point on every long driving day during the trip, Emily would break out the joy bags<\/strong>, as she called them, to add a little surprise to the day. The kids quickly started looking forward to the joy bags, especially the 7-year-old, and there were squeals of delight every time Emily distributed them. There were fidget spinners and squishy balls and my personal highlight, kites. We spent an amazing couple of hours at a rest area in Sheridan, Wyoming, flying kits with the Bighorn Mountains in front of us and a prairie dog town behind us.<\/p>\n

We did two other things that helped our kids stay positive and engaged during the trip. One was an idea from Emily’s sister: snack boxes<\/strong>. Before we left, Emily packed a shoebox-sized Tupperware full of snacks for each of the kids. We told them that what was in the snack box would have to last the entire trip. They could eat all their snacks by day two and be hungry the rest of the time, or they could stretch it out for all eight days. This worked really well. Every time one of the kids said they were hungry, we just reminded them of their snack boxes. The snack boxes cut way down on the grumbling, and they made sure that the kids didn’t eat too much junk food on the road. The 7-year-old ate most of his sweet snacks early in the trip, but he never complained about being left with Goldfish for the back half. And the 10-year-old, bless her heart, had half her snacks left when we got home. She’s a saver, that one.<\/p>\n

We also did something I’ve found really useful on past trips, and that’s having a trip allowance<\/strong>. Each morning each kid would get $5 in trip allowance, but only if they had a happy heart the day before. The 4-year-old was maybe a little young for this scheme, since she missed her allowance a couple of times, but it totally worked for the older kids. They had good attitudes all day, even the skeptical 10-year-old, who had to work hard early in the trip to not say “I’m bored” all day. She did it, however, and never missed a trip allowance. Moreover, the kids never bugged us to buy them anything in the gift shops we visited. They knew they had their trip allowance to spend. This was the 7-year-old’s first time with a trip allowance, and it took him a few days to see the value of saving, but he got there. By mid-week he had learned that if he saved for a couple of days, he could pick up much cooler toys along the way.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Going screen-free for eight days took some planning, but I’m glad we made the effort. The kids paid so much more attention to the landscape we passed (which varied considerably from Tennessee to Montana!), and they were excited to make stops and explore the sights we visited. And family time felt like family time because the kids were talking and playing together so much. This was big for the teenager, who tends to be glued to her iPad when we’re at home. I got to see a whole other side of her personality, one where she’s attentive to and interested in her siblings and generally being a quality big sister. I had been worried all school year about what she might be exposed to through her iPad. I still worry about that, but the screen-free road trip taught me that we’re missing out on her<\/em> when she’s in her own little retina display world. The experience has caused me to rethink how much screen time she gets at home, now that I know there’s a better way for her to be.<\/p>\n

And that’s how we road tripped. In my next post, I’ll share where<\/em> we road tripped!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8 days, 13 states, and 4,237 miles. That’s how we road trip. Our spring break schedules lined up this year. All four kids were out of school at the same time, and we had all four kids for the entire week of spring break. When I received an invitation to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1358,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[167,72,168,32],"class_list":["post-1347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-exploring","tag-road-trip","tag-sixofus","tag-technology","column","twocol","has-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1347"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1365,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1347\/revisions\/1365"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}