Our Trick to Peaceful Car Rides (Short and Long)

Happy New Year, all! Zoë has never been a fan of car rides. I can't say I blame her, since I, too, hate car rides. Unfortunately, car rides are just part of life (unless you're in a big city like New York, I suppose). Now, I'm not a big on letting my daughter watch TV or other screen forms, but unless she's asleep, videos are the only thing that seem to keep her complacent during a car ride.

My aunt was nice enough to give Zoë her old Samsung Tab 3 and it has been such a great gift (for Zoë and us adults). I've loaded it up with a number of different videos, most of which are educational, and the other bunch are Disney movies with the exception of three: 2 versions of Classical Baby and Madagascar. The choice of movie depends on her mood. If she's awake and has no possibility of falling asleep, I go for Signing Time or this ABC video from YouTube. If she's getting tired, I put on Classical Baby which is an HBO production. It's cute; it's an animation of a baby conducting an orchestra performing a bunch of different classical music compositions and for each song, they have a different short video story to go along with it. (I'm not sure that made much sense, but I don't know how to describe it any better...sorry.)

When we go out of town, we time our trip around her naps or nighttime sleep schedule. If she happens to wake up on a long trip, that's when I go for the longer movies. She's really into Mary Poppins, which I absolutely love and could never tire of. She was into Frozen for about a week or two, but (thankfully) she tired of that. She also enjoys Cinderella, The Lion King, and Madagascar.

One thing I've noticed, is that she is especially not a fan of her convertible car seat for nighttime trips where she's sleeping. I'm not exactly sure why, but the last trip we took with her in that seat was AWFUL. I felt so bad. We pulled over for a while, but being that it was night time, there wasn't a lot of options for us. Fortunately, the drive home wasn't as bad, but we certainly learned our lesson that until she grows out of her infant car seat, that will be what we use for trips out of town.

How does your little one do with car rides? If they're like Zoë, what do you do to placate them?