Road Trip Essentials

Well, not really.  A portable DVD player or an iPad would top my list of essentials.  But, since there's only so many times a kid can watch Toy Story 2 (and there's usually a fight about whether we're watching 2 or 3), I wanted to try a little something I pinned for this road trip. 

There are a lot of variations of the cookie sheet travel tray out there, but I wanted to take all the ideas and combine them into one TREMENDOUS TRAVEL TRAY. 

First of all, the little gel clings for the windows are a must.  The idea was for the kiddos to stick them to their "desks", as they like to call them, but they preferred putting on the windows so the light could shine through them.  

Here's one of the desks:

Nothing fancy, just a cookie sheet with some clear contact paper on it.  The dry-erase markers are magnetic, so there's nothing rolling around while Mom careens through Middle Tennessee.

Post-its are key, as are magnets, since my children are fascinated with them.  I don't know if an affinity for Post-it notes can be passed along genetically, but neither Sarah nor I can get enough of them.

I painted the flip-side of the cookie sheet with chalkboard paint, but I wish I had used spray paint so we could have had a nice flat surface.

A lot of playing with this leads to more of this:

And that means Mama gets to control the radio.

Anyway, nobody wrote on the upholstery or got a gel cling stuck in his or her ear, so I call these car desks a success!