Road Trips: How to Keep Your Vehicle Organized

Are we there yet? She's touching me. He's looking at me silly. I have to go to the bathroom....

Does this remind you of anything? Say, maybe a road trip with your wee ones? Or maybe just your significant other...? I joke, I joke.

A regular reader recently asked me for some organization tips for their vehicle especially geared toward all the "stuff" that they travel with for their kiddos. At first, I was a little nervous about this topic because, like most of you know, the only kiddo I travel with has four legs and is very. very. furry. But, I started to do some research and really enjoyed putting this post together. Here are five tips to help you keep your sanity on your next journey - whether it's five minutes to the grocery store or 8 hours to the in-laws.

Nothing ruins a road trip like a flat tire, an auto accident, or a potty mishap. Since we can't completely avoid these situations, the key is to be ready for them if they happen.

Pack an emergency tote or basket to store in the trunk. Include one complete outfit for each child, non-perishable snacks, bottled water, a blanket, a disposable camera, a flashlight, and a first aid kit or supplies.

{Image Via}

{Image Via}

In case of an accident (or some flashing lights reminding you to slow down), it's important to have your paperwork organized in your glove box so you don't have to dig through a mess to find it. Chances are you're going to be flustered in that situation, and digging through papers is not going to help. Use a coupon organizer to hold your auto registration, insurance information, and road side assistance card. It may also be helpful to add emergency contact information and any allergies for each of your family members. You can often find these organizers at the dollar store!

{Image Via}

No matter how prepared you are, there are bound to be messes when you travel. Having some items with you to quickly and easily clean them up will make your trip less stressful.

Use a plastic cereal container lined with a plastic bag as a small trash can in your vehicle. This keeps trash contained until you get to a spot to dump it.

{Image Via}

To keep extra plastic bags on hand, store them in a recycled cleaning wipe container, tissue box, or coffee can. 

{Image Via}

Speaking of cleaning wipes, keep a tub of cleaning wipes or baby wipes in the car for clean up. To avoid the mess of crumbs that often comes with snacking on those longer car rides, try to pack crumb-free snacks like dried fruit, string cheese, to-go yogurt, apples, bananas, etc. Less mess!

Keeping the young ones busy is key to a peaceful trip. Try playing fun road trip games like i-spy or the alphabet game. You can also find a ton of free printables and other game ideas just by searching Google. 

For independent activities, reading books, coloring books, and flashcards are great. Stock a clipboard with blank paper, writing paper, coloring pages, or activity pages. This keeps them all together and gives your kids a "desk" in the car.

Flashcards can be stored in ziplock bags or recycled plastic containers.

Crayons, colored pencils, and other drawing utensils can be stored in a recycled wipes container or a pencil box. Or use those stick on shower baskets stuck on the windows to keep crayons and other items in reach of your little ones.

{Image Via}

{Image Via}

Utilize a magazine file to keep books together. You can stash the holders between the seats or on the floor. These can easily be made out of an old cereal box if you wanted to avoid the expense of purchasing them.

{Image Via}

How do you keep all this "stuff" organized? How about a hanging file system. There are many options here including sewing one of your own (patterns are all over the internet) or buying one. 

{Image Via}

{Image Via}

{Image Via}

You could also use a shoe organizer (found at the dollar store) or a fabric tote bag to serve the same purpose.

{Image Via}

{Image Via}

If you are traveling with more than one child, sometimes it's helpful to give each of them their own stash of activities and snacks. Not only will this make it easier for them to reach, but it will eliminate common arguments about who has what and who wants what. 

Pack a tote for each child with a pack of wipes, books, drawing utensils and paper, electronics, snacks, and a sealable water bottle. You may also want to add a blanket and a favorite stuffed animal for naps. Stash the tote bags between the seats for easy access.

{Image Via}

{Image Via}

In lieu of a tote bag, you could use a fabric drawer or a plastic tote.

{Image Via}

I hope these tips prove useful to all of you and help you to have fun and safe road trips this summer! 

What tips do you have to keep your car in order and your passengers happy?

This post was shared in a link party over at:

          

Organizing a Storybook Baby Shower

Happy Tuesday! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday weekend. The weather in our neck of the woods was perfect. We enjoyed some baseball, some time on the river, and lots of quality time with friends and family. 

Speaking of family, my cousin is expecting a baby girl any day now! A few weeks ago, we put together a shower to celebrate. For some people, event planning comes naturally. For the rest of us, it's a lot of work! So I thought it'd be fun to share some of the tips and tricks I used to put this girly shower together!

To start, I put together a list of all of the main items that needed to be decided on:

• Date & Time
• Location
• Guest List
• Theme
• Invitations
• Food & Drinks
• Games
• Prizes
• Party Favors
• Decor
• Thank You notes

To settle on a date and time, we started by checking with the guest of honor to see what days would work for her. Once we had a few days to pick from, we chose one that the five of us hosts could all attend. 

To choose the location, we looked around at some different options including hosting it at one of our homes, a local restaurant, a church, or another facility. It's important when considering an outside facility to ask about reservation costs, cleaning fees, etc so there are no surprises at the end of your event. We decided on our church because it was free to use the facility and, since they have a fully furnished kitchen, we wouldn't need to bring dishes, platters, silverware, etc. It worked out perfect.

Putting together the guest list isn't always an easy task. We considered who had already been invited to previous showers and how far out into our extended family we wanted to go. For a baby shower, be sure to consider the mommy-to-be's mother and grandmothers, aunts, cousins, siblings, and close friends just to name a few. We settled on a pretty small list of 25. 

Once we knew the when, where, and who it was time to start the fun planning. Since my cousin had four other showers already, these soon-to-be-parents were quickly overwhelmed with a plethora of gifts. Now, when you're having your first child, too many goodies to get started doesn't sound like a bad thing - but it can certainly be overwhelming. To help contain the craziness, I proposed a book shower in which each guest would be requested to bring a book for the new baby. Our hope was to start a library for this baby girl so that she'd be set on books for awhile. 

The book shower idea also set the theme for the shower: A storybook shower. Our invitations, food and drink selections, games, and prizes all revolved around the idea of books.

Our invites were a simple book shape and the inside held all the details about the shower and a cute note about the request to bring a book:

Our food menu was as follows: 

Ham Sandwiches & Deviled Eggs 
Green Eggs and Ham

Meatballs 
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Veggies 
Peter Rabbit

Fruit Skewers 
The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Goldfish
One Fish, Two Fish

Cookies 
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Raspberry Pink Lemonade Punch 
Pinkalicious

We purchased the corresponding books and displayed them by each food item. The variety created a nice spread for a filling and delicious lunch.

After lunch, we played a short game called Name That Storybook, which I discovered here. Each item was a line from a popular children's book and our guests had to guess the title of the book. Our winner had 11 out of 12 correct! Our prize for the game winner stayed in the book theme and was a nice journal with some matching pens, sticky notes, and some chocolates. (Because it's perfect to eat chocolate while reading, journaling, or doing any other activity for that matter.)

When the game winner gets a prize, our guest of honor gets a prize too so we gifted our mom-to-be with a book titled "To My Daughter". It's a book that mom will fill out all about herself and her experience being a mom and can later gift to her daughter as a keepsake. 

Each of our guests also got a party favor. I colored some Hershey chocolate bars to say the word "her" or "she" in pink. (Hint: If you're having a boy shower, you can color in "he" or if you're having a gender reveal party, you can color "he" in blue and "she" in pink!) On the back of each bar was a cute thank you poem I found here.

Our decor was pretty simple. We bought coordinating tablecloths in pink, yellow, and white. Each guest table had a pink or yellow mum in the middle with a dish of mints and a dish of chocolate candies to snack on. Since the food table was covered with food and books, we left the decor to just the colorful tablecloth. And the gift table was covered in pretty pastel wrapped gifts, so it was beautiful on its own.

We provided our mom-to-be with a set of thank you notes that she could send out following the shower and had each guest fill out a stamped envelope with their address so mom wouldn't have to dig up addresses later. We think she has enough to do! We also provided each of our guests an index card in which they could write some parenting advice, a note to baby, etc and we collected those into a cute baby girl photo album for mom to take home. 

All in all, the shower was a great success. Everyone loved the theme, the decor, and the gifts. And our guests didn't disappoint! This little girl will be able to open her own library for all the other babies in the neighborhood! 

This post was shared in a link party over at:

     

Cleaning Out the Garage

If there is one area of our home that has been neglected for a couple years, it's certainly the garage. It has become a dumping ground for a lot of things including yard tools, car care products, outdoor activities, etc. The mess had gotten bad enough that even the Mister said we should address it! Cleaning out the garage was one of my tasks on my May Cleaning schedule so having help with this messy job was great. We got up early a few Sundays ago and tackled the disaster.

Our garage is not finished on two of it's three walls, so the studs are visible. There were nails randomly pounded into a stud here and there to hold a tool or a bag, but there was no rhyme or reason to where anything was located. There was also a pegboard not being utilized and hooks on the ceiling that were left empty. 

So to get started, we cleared everything out of the garage.

With a blank slate, we started with the largest items: our firewood storage, kayak storage, and bike storage. We kept the firewood rack but just moved it down the wall a bit. Our extra stash of firewood is located behind the garage, so moving the rack closer to the back door will make refilling it much easier. Next to the rack, we stacked up scrap wood and newspapers in old recycling containers left to us from the previous owners. 

We purchased two kayak hanging racks from our local sporting goods store and used the advantage of exposed studs to hang them on the opposite wall of the fire wood. We had to pull out quite a few nails to make this space work, but it was the most logical place for the kayaks in the garage. It's so nice to have them off the floor!

After double checking that the hooks in the ceiling were screwed into a stud, we hung each of our bikes from the hooks. Getting the bikes and kayaks off the garage floor opened up so much more space!

With the big items taken care of, we moved on to the rest of the piles in our driveway. We sorted through our car cleaning buckets and tossed anything that was empty, dried up, or just no longer of use to us. We also sorted through some bins of tools and got rid of duplicates or tools that no longer worked. These items along with our gardening tools, gas tanks, and bungee cords were organized on the metal shelf on the back wall.

Our weed wacker and hedge trimmer found a new home on the pegboard, located behind the bikes. And the rest of the larger yard tools were hung on existing nails next to the kayaks. We also put our trash and recycling carts closer to the door so they are easier to load up.

With everything having a home and most things off the floor, the garage felt twice as big. It felt so good to have it cleaned out, organized, and ready for summer. We both came home the next day and commented on how happy we felt when we went into the garage to leave for work. It's the little things in life...

Is your garage ready for summer time?

This post was shared in a link party over at: