3 Car Trip Necessities When Traveling with Toddlers

Here we are another week passed and we're ready for our "One Year and Beyond" series, this week's topic? Car Trip Necessities. You know, to be really honest here, we don't really do that many car trips, unless you could a 3 hour drive a car trip? But it was all in one day, so 6 hours in a car, I guess that counts, right? So here they are.

1. Potty training sucks, up on side and down the other, especially on long car trips. I have been tempted to just say screw it an put a diaper on him, but then what is that teaching him? Nothing, so for a few months it will suck. Make sure you leave plenty of time for bathroom breaks, and go to the bathroom before leaving your house, and try to limit water intake before and during the trip. It will save you, trust me, we learned the hard way. We haven't gone far enough where we need to actually plan a stop, but so far we've had to stop half the time, sometimes we'll just stop and eat lunch instead of getting right back on the road. (note: we have a lot of family about 2 hours away and just a hour away (we like that family best, haha, just kidding), so we're constantly in the car on the weekends, not usually enough time to warrant a stop if everyone has used the bathroom before we leave).
 
2. This doesn't really apply to us right now, but I'm going to say it anyway. We used to have an iPad (it was Mr.'s for work, which we don't have any more - I know we are probably the only people that don't own an iPad or something like that), and we used it ONLY on airplanes for movies, so Baby Fox thinks it's for airplane rides. But if we had that, or some sort of DVD system in our car, we would probably let them watch some movies in the car, if the car trip was going to be over 2 hours long.

3. We play a lot of games, like a lot.

• We actually play "the quiet game" and it's actually silent for a little bit, it's awesome. But we make it a game, we all cover our mouths and then usually me or Mr. pretends to talk so we lose the game (I can't for the life of me find the picture I took of him doing that). Baby Fox thinks it's hilarious and he can play that game for at least 20 minutes if we keep playing along.
• We play the "I Spy" Game
• We reverse role play, where Baby Fox will be me and I will be him, it's hilarious
• We make anything and everything a game, like the quiet game or let's see if Mini Fox is asleep yet, let's find the next (Fill in the type) kind of truck
• Lately Baby Fox has been into making up stories, so we all go around and make up a store about ghosts is the hot topic at the moment
• And sometimes, we just all sit in silence and watch everything that passes by, or we look for trucks

Bottom line, we don't really distract him much with things, we have a lot of conversation and quiet time. We rarely listen to the radio/music*. And we don't typically allow eating in the car, sometimes Cheerios, but rarely do we do that. So far it's really worked out for us, but we've always done this, so he doesn't know any different. I think some of my fondest memories are road trips with my family, don't particularly remember the trip, but we all remember being on the road together. We're hoping we can do the same for our kids, talking and laughing our way to our next destination.

*see number 2

  Hopefully you can find these tips helpful for your summer travels.  Make sure to check out the other mama's blogs for even more tips!  And be sure to link up with us below if you also have a post on this.

Like a Morning Cup of Coffee// From Here to Eternity// The Not Quite Military Wife//

A Cowboy's Life// My Delicious Adventure// Sadie Sky Boutique// Meet the Sullivan's//

Love and Life//  Foxy's Domestic Side// Everyday Love// Life of Faith

July 10:  Keeping your marriage alive with a toddler

July 17:  Favorite summer toddler activities

July 24:  Helping Your Toddler to Communicate (Words, emotions, etc.)

July 31:  Dealing with Separation Anxiety

Aug 7:    Car Trip Necessities

Aug 14:  Deciding when the time is right for baby #2 (and/or how to handle these questions)

Aug 21:  Tricks for eating out with your toddler

Aug 28:  Feeling confident as a mom (How to feel this way, Your struggle with, etc.)

An InLinkz Link-up

That Time I Got Up on a Wall for an Outfit Post in front of my Family

Talk about embarrassing, I wanted to just take a few pictures before the night got going, but Mr. said, get up on that wall, the pictures will be amazing. If you can't tell not only my lipstick was bright red but so was my face.

I thought I color corrected this picture, but I guess not. Oh well. You get the idea. This is what I wore to the wedding on Saturday. Want to know the best part? I didn't even have a dress before Thursday to wear to the wedding. But I went shopping with my mom and found this dress in the sale section of Ann Taylor and then there was an additional 60% off, can you say score?!

Those baby hairs are really annoying, but I guess I should be thankful that my hair is growing back after losing a LOT of it after Mini Fox came.

In case you wanted to see Mr. dressed up.  Isn't he the cutest?

That's right, I was standing on that wall behind us

In other happenings, a friend down the street just had a baby and I thought I would make some homemade mac and cheese, cause who doesn't love homemade mac and cheese. The recipe is super easy, and I put them in these square foil dishes. It came in a three pack and I used two of them, so they could either put one in the freezer for later, or just so they could have fresher mac and cheese tomorrow. So simple to do, and they were so thankful.

Don't you just love newborn sleepiness?

He slept the whole time I was there...he's so cute and I think he's going to be a great pianist because his fingers are so long! I think he was born to be one!

Linking up with Because Shanna Said So, Get Your Pretty On, The Pleated Poppy, and Tucker Up
Also Linking up with Ashley and Jess for "It's the Little Things".

Are you a No-Reply Blogger?

This used to be me, until I discovered otherwise. It's SO MUCH better to have your email attached to your account. Why? Here's five reasons:

1. You can chat back and forth with other bloggers via email
2. People don't always go back to their comments, so when you reply to their comment or vice versa, they don't get a notification that you've written back to them.
3. You form great friendships via emailing back and forth, when sometimes you wouldn't write such personal stuff in the comments section.
4. Emailing directly is just much more personable.
5. It makes everyone happy, especially me when I can write to you directly and know that you are going to read what I'm going to write.

Please note that my blogger account is set up with another email address, before I even thought up this blog here. So when you see the "username" know that I changed it to keep some of my privacy. So if that is you, then you too can use a different email address that emails get sent to.

Okay now for the super easy tutorial.

Step 1: Check to see if you are in fact a No-Reply Blogger

Click on your name in the upper right, bring down that drop down box.

 Click on Blogger Profile

Does it look like this (see red circle)? If it does then you are a No-Reply Blogger - meaning when you comment on people's blogs they can't email you back with a response directly, they have to reply to your comment via the post and hope that you go back to read their comment.

Okay now let's fix that problem!

Step 2:

Click on the "Edit Profile"

Step 3: 

Enter the email address you would like replies to go to.

Step 4: The most important step, check the box next to "Show my email address"

Step 4: Now go back to your profile via step 1 and see if you see the "Contact me"

Congrats! You are now offically a reply blogger, yay! Now let's go chat!

And one last picture, just cause:

You know you're from California when you wake up and it's 63° out and you think, brrr, it's going to be cold, better bundle up. Yes I am wearing a long sleeve t-shirt, jean jacket and jeans and the high today is supposed to be 82°, that did not stop me from feeling all warm this morning.
 

My Computer Maxed Out

I wanted to have this great post for you guys today, but guess what happened yesterday? I went to load all of my pictures from the weekend, and I realized I didn't have enough room on my hard drive to load the pictures. So I spent all of yesterday, moving pictures around to different hard drives and making DVD of pictures so that I have a back up to my back up. I don't know what I would do if I lost everything...probably cry...really hard.

In case you wanted to know how many pictures I've taken, I only take jpegs (so no RAW photos) and since Mini Fox was born in September, I've taken 33 GB of pictures. Yes and that doesn't count the special occasions that I've taken, so let's just round up to at least 35 GB of pictures, in 11 months. You can imagine how many photos I have. It's crazy.

I did manage to send some pictures from my phone.

Friday we had a play date with these kids, it might be a while till our next Friday play date all together, sniff, sniff. Guess we'll really have to plan to hang out on the weekends!

The lady in the middle is going back to work...

Saturday we went to Cousin #9's wedding, boy was it fun! I'll recap later this week, it was that fun. Seriously, the pictures are awesome.

Waiting for the ceremony to begin.

Gotta love the new hairs that are growing in...at least they are growing back, must be thankful instead of annoyed

Silly faces

We didn't get back till 1am, yesterday was spent sleeping in, relaxing and getting ready for Monday work.

Hope you guys had a great weekend! I know we did!

Linking up with Faith, Sarah and Heather for Mommy Moments

and with Bella & Lisa

5 Tips on How to Deal with Separation Anxiety

Here we are another week passed and we're ready for our "One Year and Beyond" series, this week's topic? Dealing with separation anxiety. And boy do we have that over here. This is how we deal with it, although I'm looking forward to seeing what other people have to say.

Although I am gone all day, Baby Fox is with the same person all day everyday. We have never dropped him off somewhere, so when he turned 18 months and could communicate with us we started taking him to the gym daycare. It was only for an hour, but it was somewhere that we could drop him off and pick him up. We were pretty consistent in taking him at least once a week. But the thing was, he was always the ONLY kid in there. So not much different from a regular day. Now that we belong to the new gym it's a whole different ball game. They have 50-100 kids going through there at any given time, it's crazy busy. It's overhwhelming for Baby Fox, this are 5 ways how we've dealt with the separation anxiety for our 3.5 year old.

1. I have to remember that this is the best for him. One day I am going to have to drop him off at school, and there are going to be a LOT of kids, I would rather him figure it out an hour or so at a time then have to be there all day trying to figure out. To me that seems traumatizing.

2. There will be crying and that's okay. It breaks my heart every single time. I cried, he cried, I got frustrated, he cried some more, I cried way more. To hear him crying when I leave and yelling for me not to leave him is heart breaking. But I know that I have to do it. Most of the time though, the teacher distracts him with something shiny and he stops crying 30 seconds after I walk out of the door. But I do have to say that the first 5-6 times we went, they had to call me back to the daycare because he had been crying for more than 10 minutes, but it does get better (coming from a mom with the most clingy kid)

3. We bring something from home that he can carry around with him. We bring something that isn't necessarily his favorite, but something that he can hold and feel a little bit at home. Mostly it's one of his hundreds of stuffed animals.

4. I bribe him. I am not beyond that, seriously, desparate times calls for desparate measures. He's 3.5 and LOVES chewing gum. So we made a rule when he is at the gym he can chew gum, and that is the only time he can chew it (besides when he is with my parents, they seem to always give him a piece), so he basically wants to go all the time so he can get some gum.

5. At the beginning we started to give him rewards, so we would tell him, hey if you go to the gym today you can pick something out of the toy bag (we have a bag of cheap $1 toys, mostly it was for potty training but still had some left over, so we started using that). Then after the first couple of times, we said if you go 3 times you can pick something out. Then I bought him something he wanted (a baseball bat) and he had to go 4 times, then the next time he wanted the balls that went with the bat, and he had to go 5 times. So over the course of a few months (going twice a week) it slowly got better. Don't get me wrong he still cries when I leave, if I'm leaving him with someone he doesn't know (I try to go when there are teachers there that he knows, but it doesn't always work out), but usually 30 seconds after I leave he's done crying, and when I get back, he's playing and doesn't want to leave, so I know he's really okay. 

I just have to keep reminding me, this is good for him. He needs to play with other kids, I would rather do this now then at preschool in the Fall. I can do this!

Here are the previous topics:

Week 1 - Keeping Your Marriage Alive with a Toddler
Week 2 - 10 Fun Summer Activities for Toddlers 
Week 3 - Toddler Communication   

 

Dealing with separation anxiety can be tough for any mama.  Be sure to check out the other mamas in our series for their helpful posts.  If you've got a post on separation anxiety, don't forget to link it up with us below!

Like a Morning Cup of Coffee// From Here to Eternity// The Not Quite Military Wife//

A Cowboy's Life// My Delicious Adventure// Sadie Sky Boutique// Meet the Sullivan's//

Love and Life//  Foxy's Domestic Side// Everyday Love// Life of Faith

July 10:  Keeping your marriage alive with a toddler

July 17:  Favorite summer toddler activities

July 24:  Helping Your Toddler to Communicate (Words, emotions, etc.)

July 31:  Dealing with Separation Anxiety

Aug 7:    Car Trip Necessities

Aug 14:  Deciding when the time is right for baby #2 (and/or how to handle these questions)

Aug 21:  Tricks for eating out with your toddler

Aug 28:  Feeling confident as a mom (How to feel this way, Your struggle with, etc.)

An InLinkz Link-up

#YESMOM - Water Balloons

Sunday was hot and humid so I wanted something cool, but nice to wear to church. I've worn this dress in the past, with the added belt it makes it feel/look like a completely different outfit. Which I love how just a few accessories can go a long way.

Dress - Target (old), Belt - White House Black Market (old),  Necklace - Stella and Dot, Shoes - Toms

Have I told you how much I love bright lips? Sorry about the squinting, it was bright outside and I was facing the sun so I wouldn't get really weird shadows on my face, like last time.

I love the back of this dress.

Moving on the perfect #yesmom momment.

Two words: Water Balloons

We got them for our Christmas In July package from Jasam, perfect for this heat! When I got home from work I thought this would be the perfect time to do this with Baby Fox. Mini Fox was down for a nap, so it was something we could do with just him.

Before we even started the water balloon fight, Mr. was spraying me with the hose, and Baby Fox thought it was hilarious! Also, Baby Fox took this photo with my iPhone. I think he did pretty good.

We filled up 10 balloons at a time, and then just hit each other...fyi: if the balloons don't pop right when they hit you, they HURT!

Getting Daddy

Getting Mommy

And since we were all soaking wet at the end, we all jumped into the pool. Baby Fox had the best time, and seeing this smile makes it all worth it, cause you all know how many times I get in the pool, definite #yesmom momment.

Linking up with Because Shanna Said So, Get Your Pretty On, The Pleated Poppy, and Tucker Up
Also Linking up with Ashley and Jess for "It's the Little Things".

Let's Talk Top Coat

Linking up with Andrea and Erika for a Favorite Things Party. I have been meaning to tell you guys about my new favorite thing, and here's my chance. It's a life changer, seriously.

I know you guys can't wait to hear what it is...

This bottle of top coat is life changing. I can't even tell you how much I love this stuff. I found it through this girl, on her Manicure Monday. I bought it from Drugstore.com* for $5.99. Seriously, it makes your nails dry within 5 minutes of putting it on, and it gives your nails that salon feel, you know your nails feel super thick and great? Yeah, this stuff does that. Only one coat and it feels/looks like you've been to the salon. I always have the problem where I'll do something and there used to ALWAYS be creases in my nail polish, no more, this completely makes that go away because it dries so quickly. I can't tell you how much you guys need to get this stuff. It does have a strong smell though.

*I was going to buy it through amazon, but there were some reviews saying that it was fake, so beware if you buy it through amazon.