How Michelle Duggar Keeps Her Kids Happy While Traveling

FAMILY TRAVEL on 03.15.13

Michelle Duggar19 Kids and CountingBIO

 

Photo: DCL

Travel question from a "19 Kids and Counting" fan: How do you keep all of your children entertained and happy on a long plane trip?

One of our favorite travel activities is reading. We always have our reading book bag with all of our favorites in it. The kids usually team up as reading buddies. My readers that are still learning team up with an older child to practice: Johannah, who’s 7 years old, teams up with Jennifer, who's a bit younger and still learning her phonics; and Jordan loves to read out loud to the little ones.

In addition to the buddy reading, the younger ones get coloring books with crayons and blank paper so that they can make pictures, cards, notes, and things like that. They have their backpacks packed with those kinds of activities to keep their little hands and heads busy.

The older ones also have card games in their packs. We don’t really give those to the younger ones because they might scatter the cards around the plane and lose them. They can't play those games quite yet, but the older ones enjoy them!

For travel snacks, we have a few favorites that we always pack. We usually take turkey or beef jerky, but for this trip we weren’t allowed to take meat into Asia. So we had to take that out of our travel snack plan, but we have other snacks like raw almonds, peanut butter crackers and dried fruit. We also like dried fruit and nut mixes -- trail mix and stuff like that. We try to avoid the sugary sweet stuff.

When we travel, we pack single-serving prepackaged portions for each of the kids. We don't typically buy them in single-serving packages because they're more expensive, but when we travel it’s more practical for each of us to have snacks handy in our own backpacks. It helps everyone to have their own little supply kit with some snacks and activities to keep busy with.

Travel along with Michelle and the Duggars as they take their first trip to Japan and China. Tune in Tuesdays 9|8c, for 19 Kids and Counting: Duggars Do Asia.