Reply to Eight hour car ride with 15 month old

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Reply to "Eight hour car ride with 15 month old"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m shocked to see so many posters saying they wouldn’t do the drive or they would only do it at night.  We take 7-8hour drives twice a year, starting when my kids were about a year old.  We leave in the morning, cause I’m not a good night driver and didn’t want my husband to be stuck with the whole drive himself.  We leave around 8am and only stop 2-3x.  The biggest thing to remember is that every time you take a baby/toddler out of the car seat they won’t want to go back in.  They will cry and it will be difficult toward the end of the drive.  Once I have set my expectations low, the drive goes better.  Some tips: only give the tablet when they start fussing/crying.  If they are content, let them be.  Keep toys up front and pass back one at a time so they aren’t bored by hour 3 of your drive.  Bring LOTS of snacks.  Find a soundtrack of favorite show, baby shark, nursery rhymes…anything familiar and play it on the car stereo if the baby starts to cry the last hour and you just want to get there.  We have tried breaking up our drive by staying in a hotel and it just didn’t work for us.  Our baby couldn’t get settled in the hotel and the next day he didn’t want to get back in the car.  It works better for us to drive straight through.  [/quote]

This is what we do too- my parents are around 7hrs away as well (well, really more like 9hrs with the kids).  We've driven around twice per year to them since they were each around 3 months old.  I'm not a huge fan of night driving, but our route to get there is not all major highway so not many places to stop that would be open 24hrs, plus parts of the route are not well lit and prone to deer.  I would think about these things before committing to a night drive.  My sister once fell asleep at the wheel at night and crashed into a tree (was fine, thankfully) so that always makes me a bit wary too.  I drove back from Cape Cod one time at night on my own, and it was super miserable- thought I'd be avoiding the CT traffic only they were doing night construction on I-95 so there were tons of lane closures and it still took forever. [/quote]

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