This is How We Roll

My family and I really enjoy road trips. It's a good thing since we rarely fly anywhere.  The kids enjoy car rides and they entertain themselves pretty easily.  Though, if Buggy and and I are in the car for more than 20 minutes without her older brother, she's very concerned that we've left him behind and will fuss.

Over the last several years the family has taken several multi-hour road trips. We've driven to Maine numerous times. About 10 hours pre-children, about 12-15 hours post-children.  We drove to Chicago and back last summer. About 13 hours each way. We drove from Chicago to Green Bay...I want to say it was about 5 hours.

Hubby and I always try to finish a long car ride and not break it up into two days. I don't know why we do this to ourselves, but we do.  The car ride is not torturous by any means. However, just because we stay up to drive all day and into the night does not give us a free pass to sleep in the next day. No matter how long we've been driving and how tired we are, we still have to get up bright and early (or as early as the children do) to take care of the kids.

We have a minivan to haul all our stuff (pack n play, double stroller, cooler with munchies, baby backpack for hiking...you get the idea.) An added bonus to our minivan is the DVD player and wireless headsets. We've used them multiple times for long car rides. This year Hubby made sure that we had quite the selection of DVDs and this would be the first year that Buggy would be able to enjoy them.  Do you know that we didn't use it once on our way to Maine or back? Awesome!

One of the things that I did do before traveling was to buy the Chronicles of Narnia on CD. I love books on CD. I have the entire Harry Potter series and listened to them in the middle of the night while nursing and rocking my first born, on car trips, and while making dinner. Boogie has heard "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe" at least once a couple of years ago. But now that his vocabulary has expanded he was more interested in it this time around.  He wanted to listen to the whole story and would not take a nap in the car because he was so interested in the story. When we finished "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe" he wanted to hear another "Aslan" story. It's a good thing I bought the whole set! We listened to several books on the way home. At one point I told Boogie that he and Lillian could watch a movie until our next stop. He said no and said he wanted to hear Aslan. So that 's what we did! We listened and enjoyed stories all the way home. I was impressed that a book on CD won over DVDs.  He listened and asked really good questions for clarification, which we enjoyed answering.

As a mom and a Reading Specialist I was really, really pleased :)

I currently have The Chronicles of Narnia, The Harry Potter Series, and A Wrinkle in Time on CD. Do you have any suggestions for other kid friendly books on CD? Especially a series? Please share!