Roadtrip with a Toddler

Autumn is 15 months old. She has two naps – first at 10:30 and the second at 3:30. For Christmas, we had a 5 hour drive across the state. We tried to keep her on nap time and thankfully it worked pretty good! Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. Happy travels, loves!

Go with the flow!

But don’t change too much if you can help it.

Create the nap environment.

Bring the lovey, play the sleepy sounds or music (fade to the back if it drives you nuts), use painters tape to black out a little (it was my biggest road trip discovery!)

Have parent snacks easy to access

Avoid the reach anywhere near the little one to grab crunchy sounding bags of chips or such. Similarly, try to use the restrooms before you hit the road.

Don’t greet them right away when they seem to wake up.

This may not fit your parenting style, which is totally fine. When Autumn wakes up from naps at home, she doesn’t have someone right there to greet her. We let her play solo in her crib until she poops or is sick of being alone. So we treat road trip wake ups fairly the same. We don’t turn around the moment they start to wake up, assuming the nap time is done. We let her have her own time to wake up and the option to “snooze.” This is actually super important for us in our sleep training!

Prepare for wake up

Some wake-time tricks that helped us get through this particular trip:

1. Have a playlist of sing-alongs or story books on audio. We loved listening and singing well-known Christmas songs. I was honestly surprised at how fun it was.
2. Prepare wake up snacks so you only have to stop for diaper changes. We use spinach and fruit smoothies because they are easy and low-mess.
3. New or favorite toys are super helpful but hold on to them until they are getting bored.

Overall, stay cool.

My baby has proven to gauge her attitude by mine. It’s been such a refreshing experience in parenting for me to realize the importance of my composure.