Mummy, are we home yet?

How many times have you heard your 4 year old ask this question from the back seat of the car as you drive the last hundred miles home after the summer vacation.
Before we hit the highway, the younger ones were already fidgeting.  And, despite the fact that the holiday home was still four hours away, the question kept coming every five minutes. This certainly annoys the older kids and, tension within the confines of the car can start to rise.
The last thing the weary driver needs as she gives her full attention to the busy lanes, is someone distracting her.

Finding a way to keep the kids occupied is a must.
The ‘I Spy’ game is good for maybe half an hour well, that is providing everyone is concentrating.

On one occasion my star performer spied the steering wheel and her clue was ws and it probably won’t surprise you that windscreen was the answer. But windscreen it wasn’t and many miles later nobody got the answer. And what do you know, her nibs got her steering wheel and her windscreen muddled up! She was not too popular for a while after that.
What happens when everyone gets tired of this game? Well, there’s always ‘Give Me a Clue’ but, some of those end up in almighty rows because the clue was a bit off. No thanks, a row in the back seat of the car is not a great recipe for an enjoyable journey.
So, what is the long term solution to prevent four energetic kids from getting bored?

This summer, we found the answer in an audiobook article. Off to our local electronic shop to purchase the necessary gadgets We bought each of them an MP3 player, downloaded some children’s audiobooks from the net and as Shakespeare might say, ‘the rest is silence’.
And, silence it was because the audiobooks we chose were fairly lengthy, now, not as long as War and Peace (60 hours) but long enough to keep the little darlings quiet for most of the journey.

We had toyed with the idea of burning some audiobooks onto CD’s and letting everyone hear the same story, but, this was bound to spark another row. “I don’t like Shakespeare, I don’t like Superman, I don’t like Roald Dahl etc..etc…’
I would advise you to allow the children some choice here too, so that they do not feel forced to listen to something they might not be too interested in.
Take a look at the recommended reading titles from your local high school or college, and you will find that many of the educational titles are readily available in audiobook format.
When they get a little older, the daily trips on the school bus could easily be put to good use by listening to some of the classic literature titles or language audiobooks from the curriculum.

audiobooks we selected: The Book of Pirates, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Chaos King, Groosam Grange, Coraline, and Alice in Wonderland. And, there are plenty of titles for the adults as well.~There really is a very wide choice of titles now on audio books, for example, nursery rhymes, action and adventure, ghost stories, romance, animals etc…Enough to keep the entire family occupied}

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