Eating in the Car

Who knew it could be so fun? To me it’s something I do only out of necessity. But this summer I’m finding for my kids that it’s a treat.

It started last week when we were delayed meeting friends for a picnic at a children’s theme park. As we drove there I encouraged my kids to make the most of our time by eating their lunch in the van instead. I waited for the groans and complaints. Instead they cheered.

With them being 9, 7 & almost 5 it actually worked. LMH kept control of the cooler and divvied out the food. By the time we pulled into the parking lot of our destination everyone (including me!) had finished eating. And when we found our friends they were packing up their own blankets and getting ready to move on to the fun.

Fast forward to this week. My children are tired of getting up at 6:30 to eat breakfast before taking LMH to her 7:30am flute lessons. It’s summer. They want to sleep in. I want them to sleep in. So we’ve found a new arrangement that everyone loves. I let them sleep until 7am and then they pack up a little container of dry cereal to munch on in the car while they wait during lessons (and LMH takes her own container to eat on the way home - not before, lest she blow cereal bits into that precious instrument).

Now as I’m packing for the She Speaks conference I’m thinking this same thing might work well for my plane trip. Instead of eating breakfast in the airport, I could take one of those individual serving boxes of cereal that we have in our pantry for camping. With some milk from the flight attendant I could have breakfast on the plane. That works for me!

For more fun tips check out Rocks in My Dryer's Works-For-Me-Wednesday post.