Real-life reviews from parents.
Explore our lists & add your tips.

Involve them however you can, so they have some choice in the process. For us, it is often picking the story we read, or the number of books we read (within reason), as well as which kid goes first to brush teeth or take their bath.

Consistency is a key factor !

I bought peepee teepees and used one once. Receiving blankets. Used maybe once or twice. Baby nail file! As much as I have to admit it...just get clippers and suck up the fear of cutting their nails. The files don’t work very well.

Blankets, quilts. Used swaddling blankets only.

If there are six apples and you take away four, how many apples do you have? Four.

The more you take away from me, the bigger I get. What am I? A hole.

Looking for seashells is a classic beach activity for kids that mine love to do every single time we go. I usually set a limit for how many they can bring home each time, and have learned to designate a special jar or mesh bag as the "seashell" holder to avoid creating an entire beach at home!

My kids LOVE using grabbers, and picking up litter at the beach is really and truly one of their favorite beach activities - helping the environment is just a bonus. I've gotten grabbers on Amazon, at the dollar store, and at Costco, and they all seem to hold up about the same (which is not all that long, unfortunately), so I suggest buying the cheapest you can find. The grabbers with a trigger rather than a squeeze handle seem easiest for little hands to use.

What did the shark say when it ate the clown fish? Tastes funny.

Why does a duck have feathers? To cover his butt quack

Annie! A classic for the whole family, always. Kids were 7 and 9 when we saw it, and we were coming out of an obsession with the movies, which made it extra fun!

I love the stage version of Beauty and the Beast! It's just similar enough to the familiar Disney movie for kids to understand everything, but just different enough to keep it fresh. The extra songs are some of my favorites.....and there's nothing like the magic of watching the beast turn into a prince right before your eyes!

Sharks and minnows is fun, and it gets played a lot at school. Players stand along a starting line, and must reach the finish line without being tagged by the shark. Any minnows who are tagged by the shark become sharks, too. Repeat racing across until all remaining minnows have been tagged. The winner is the last minnow to be tagged.

Hide and seek is one of the best childhood games for kindergartners or preschoolers to play with bigger siblings! The person who is "it" covers her eyes and counts while the other players hide. The seeker must find all of the other players, and the last one to be found becomes the new seeker. You can play variations where the seeker must tag the other players, or where there is a home base that the hiders need to reach to become safe.

Granola bars are so easy to travel with, and are a hearty road trip snack that still tastes like a treat.

Grapes are good healthy road trip snacks as they hold up much better than most other fresh fruit while traveling. If you've got little ones, you can cut them after washing to avoid a possible choke hazard.

Surge protector

Basic OTC medications and first-aid kit, like Tylenol, Advil, Zyrtec, Benadryl, bandaids, Neosporin, hydrogen peroxide.

Join the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) reciprocal network. Register with a flat yearly fee at your local children's museum (it pays itself off very fast!) and you'll receive 50% off at sooo many children's museums nationwide. (You'll earn free membership at your local museum, too.) Where are you headed? Find a children's museum in the ACM network here: https://findachildrensmuseum.org/

Though dining out is part of the travel experience and something to embrace, we never fail to make a quick grocery store run on day 1 of the trip, especially for breakfast items so we can wake up and casually eat at "home": cereal, milk, bagels, fruit, coffee, etc. This is less expensive (and less time consuming) than eating out every single morning.