44 Hours in the Car

We just returned from a much needed getaway: a family trip to Florida. This was the first beach trip for us with the kids; my partner and I both road-tripped to Florida with our families when we were children. As you probably guessed from the title of this post, we drove. It was 22+ hours in the car each way, with four kids ages 2, 3, 5, and 6.

The road trip of today is quite different than those I experienced as a child in the 70s and 80s. Most striking is the carseat factor. My brother and I used to set up in the back of our Oldsmobile station wagon. We had our own portable tape player back there. We’d sit and play cards, build with legos, and create fully furnished houses with paper and scissors and glue. We could lay down and read or nap. When we were crabby with each other, we’d climb over the seat and take turns sitting in the front of the car, chatting with whichever parent was driving. Not so today. My two youngest kids are in 5-point restraint carseats, my two oldest in 3-point seatbelts and full-back boosters. They can never sit in the front seat because of the air bags. They are stuck in their same in-car positions, staring at the same view, kicking the backs of the same seats, sharing (or arguing) with the same sibling.

Even with four virtually motionless children (ha!) here’s what made the trip doable:

• Coloring books: a pile of cheap $1 coloring/maze/connect the dot books (some sports and fairy ones, although none that are licensed). These worked for a while, although Gretel and Teri lost their crayon privileges on the way home for writing on many things that were NOT the coloring books.
• Small erasable magnetic writings boards
• Mini Etch-a-Sketchs
• Sticker activity books (I bought a new one for Gretel in Florida because her original one had very thin stickers that kept tearing when she’d try to peel them back.)
• Playmobile people with wheeled accessories (1 skateboarder, 1 biker, 1 motorcycler, and 1 roller-blader)
• Matchbox cars
• Recycled (we already had 2) and redressed dolls (pictured above)
• Magnetic activity boards: The ones I thought were going to be great (building houses and flowers) were terrible because the magnets weren’t very strong and kept slipping to the floor. But one of the hits of the entire trip was a Brown Bear magnet set I purchased for Teri, with magnets to match the illustrations from her favorite book. That bought us hours.
• Portable DVD players, and favorite DVDs from home (Cars, Happy Feet, Mary Poppins, Cheaper by the Dozen) and some new ones from friends (Kiki’s Delivery Service). We borrowed a friend’s old player, and at the last minute my husband bought us another new one ($90), which turned out to be good. We set up the first movie between the front two seats, made sure all the kids could see, and then found out that even with the volume all the way up Jaja and Rico in the third row seats couldn’t hear the movie. So we let them be in charge of their own DVD player with a different movie.
• Lap desks: 1 left over from college and 2 homemade (stiff cardboard, 2 squares cut from an old t-shirt, pillow stuffing, and duct-tape)
• A bag full of books: old favorites, a few library books, and our brand new collection of fairy tales featuring Black characters

The crowning glory of the vacation presents were these floofy little zip-up bags (okay, my girls AND my husband call them purses, sigh) that came with a matching fairy/dancer inside (pink, green, blue). If the store had sold four different colors, I would have purchased one for Rico as well. Instead, I found him this great little finger puppet person the same size as the girls’ dancers. Rico’s person has a mop of spiky blue hair and is playing a tiny electric guitar (he calls it his punk rocker). I found a small drawstring bag we had here at home, sewed a piece of an old woven belt of mine around the bottom, and Rico now had a fancy bag for his guy.

We’re in the not-buying mode around here, especially cheap plastic. But before we left on vacation, I was caving. I had lined up a sitter for the kids so I could go to a doctor’s appointment, and I planned to do a bit of car activity shopping at the same time. I confessed to a couple people I was planning to go on a junk run to Toys-R-Us. I haven’t been there in years. (Can I now just say what a horrible store this is? The lighting, the maze set-up, everything needing batteries, plastic that never ends, boys’ toys in black with guns, girls’ toys in pink with mini-skirts and make-up, AAK!) Anyway, on my 45-minute drive to my appointment, I had second thoughts. I didn’t want to waste money on toys that we’d give away when we arrived home, and I (still) didn’t want to support the companies that make those toys with our money. (Toys-R-Us was basically useless, even if I had gone in wanting to fill my basket with stuff I thought would entertain our kids in the car.)

Here’s the decision I had to make: was I going to buy my kids healthy toys? Or was I going to buy them racially diverse toys? Now, our existing home toy collection is heavy on PoC, more than half (by design, because every time I find something great, I buy it–even if I have to hold it for a year before giving it to the kids. We have this awesome zip-up space shuttle with two astronauts–1 Black and 1 White–that I bought when Jaja was 3 months old, and kept in a box for years). So I went with healthy, and pulled toys from home to balance out my new purchases. Those fairies and the blue-haired rocker in the little bags? All White. But they each had another little doll tucked inside the bag with them; the four dolls I added from our home collection were Black (Gretel had quite a story going about the two ’sisters’ living in her blue-feathered purse/house).

Racial balancing is something I think about every time I purchase an item that has a person in/on it. I skimmed all those sticker books to make sure there was a mix of people in them. I looked through the entire ‘natural’ toy store for something comparable to the fairies in their purses, something that had a little brown face to balance out the three little tan faces I was about to buy. (I just looked up the fairy/purse dolls online to add the photo link above; the company makes the dolls in six different coordinating colors–all six of the dolls are White.) Dolls and toys representing PoC are massively underrepresented in natural material and Waldorf-style toys, which I discovered while trying to buy a natural or organic brown-skinned doll for Jaja when she was an infant. There was nothing. Things have improved a bit in the past six years, but the fact remains that many of the organic toy companies are based in Europe (primarily Germany), and dolls of color in their collections are rare. This dearth of variety is what inspired me to make the kids’ winter-holiday gifts last year, and to start my neglected Etsy store.

Was every minute of the car ride all fun family sing-a-longs, cheerful parents, and four cooperative kids? Absolutely not. There were some hours when the kids slept, several hours of movie watching, and many many hours of activities, eating, fussing, negotiating, and the sometimes hysterically funny stereotypical parental warning, “Keep your hands, feet, and toys to yourself, or . . .” and there’s where it ended, and often when my partner and I would start to laugh. Because what exactly was the passenger seat parent going to do? Driving down I-95, we were just as trapped in our car seats as the kids were.