Summer travel and fun with kids: 20 (ish) posts to help you survive

It is most definitely here…summer…we are all melting, eating far too much ice cream, and looking forward to that six week break full of summer travel and activities with a mixture of trepidation and mild alarm.

So what better time for me to give some love to some most excellent blog posts on t’interweb that help us over the coming few weeks to both entertain the kids, and to know what to expect when we bundle them into a car or a plane to take them to foreign lands.

Here are a few top tips post for the coming summer festivities. If you have any more, then add them to my linky. The more the merrier!

Summer Travel

Preparation

Sometimes its all in the planning! So Little Lilypad has some tips for planning that family day out, so it runs more smoothly. If you know what you need when you are going with the young ‘un, it helps big time. So thanks Mrs C for the list of essentials for holidays with a toddler too. Cass from Frugal Family is making sure her summer works well by planning the best summer holiday ever…she is really making sure she thinks it through properly as she is opting for a free range summer with her kids – something Mum in the Madhouse is very keen to encourage this year. Why not join in with this too and limit your kids screen time, and get them having fun in the good old outdoors?

Flying

This is a pain even when you don’t have kids, but when you do, there is a certain face that greets you when people notice that you have a small person with you. And its not necessarily a face you would give your own mum and dad. With that in mind, Mummy Alarm has given us a bit of help when flying with babies after her own experiences with her five month old. We also have a post for long haul flying with kids on this blog too, so that’s worth checking out as well. Jennifer’s Little World has also touched on travelling with younger children on long haul flights. Plenty there to help you out methinks.

BUT, if that’s not enough, then Domestic Goddesque has some tips to keep kids occupied on long journeys, which is clearly very relevant on flights of course.

Cars

So you decided to travel by car instead, and are getting the usual,

“Are we there yet?”

Never fear, the bloggers are here to help you out with this as well. We have some good car travel with kids ideas on KiddyCharts, and so does iVillage as well with a few sensible suggestions for making those long car journeys more manageable. Wendy’s World has a couple of games to play in the car too, and Parentables has some excellent “Road Trip” printables, and yes there is a US bias, but a lot of these will work wherever you are driving!

Specific destinations

I might have cheated here slightly and this bit is a bit personal, but still useful I hope to others. We live near London so will be going, so this post on Things to do in London for Free from Kids Days Out Reviews works brilliantly for me, and so does this great post on tips for trips to Legoland from Mari’s World as I am still holding out hope that we might make it there for my fortieth this year *secret weekend away destination.*

What if you aren’t actually going anywhere though? How about you just enjoy your staycation then with these top tips from Jennifer’s Little World too!

Summer Activities

I am not original I am afraid, so I struggle to know what to do with the kids over the summer, and actually end up looking at the first and second posts in our series of what you can do for free over the summer with the littlies. There is a lot of inspiration out there about what we can all do with our kids over the summer, but here are some of those which caught my eye:

• Summer Holiday Boredom Busters from Thinly Spread which gathers the best of the crafts and other activities out there for the kids, so we don’t have do, though I still am just a little bit!
• TeePee Building from Here Come the Girls, and why wouldn’t you want to do this, exactly?
• 50 outdoor summer activities for kids from Six Sisters’ Stuff
• 10 best indoor summer activities from Babble
• 10 Apps for Toddlers from themummysphere.co.uk, just in case you do need to rely on the screens every once in a while *no shame*

So there we have it – 20 (ish) of the best posts I found on helping you with that summer travel and activity holiday chaos with the kids…see it needn’t be so bad after all.

If you have any other posts, then feel free to link them here so people can find them – be great if you can link back to this list as well, so we can all share the love too.

Helen

Helen is a mum to two, social media consultant, and website editor; and this site is (we think) the only Social Enterprise parenting magazine!Since giving up being a business analyst when juggling travel, work and kids proved too complicated, she founded KiddyCharts so she could be with her kids, and use those grey cells at the same time.KiddyCharts has reach of over 1.1million across social and the site. The blog works with big family brands (including travel) to help promote their services, as well as offering free resources to parents of kids under 10.It gives 51%+ profits to Reverence for Life, who fund a number of important initiatives in Africa, including bringing running water and basic equipment to a school in Tanzania.Helen has worked as a digital marketing consultant (IDM qualified) with various organisations, including Channel Mum, Truprint, Talk to Mums, and Micro Scooters. She loves to be creative in the brand campaigns she works on.Get in touch TODAY!

Sharing is caring!