Toys on the Fly

You get on the airplane and to your horror, your child loses interest in his toys within fifteen minutes. The three hours remaining on the flight stretch out like an eternity…

You’ve spent all morning getting your kids dressed, fed, and ready for the 15 hour roadtrip south. On the freeway 30 miles into your journey, you realize that you left your toddler’s fun bag behind in the hotel room…

You get seated at the restaurant but it’s taking forever for your waiter to come take your order. Meanwhile, your hungry child starts having a meltdown, and you’ve got nothing in your purse to distract her until the food comes.

Sound familiar?

If, like most parents, you’ve ever forgotten to bring a toy for your child while out and about – or had to forgo packing toys altogether for the sake of traveling light – there are plenty of ways you can “make” toys on the fly… and turn a potential disaster into a fun, creative outlet for you and your child.

Some ideas to get you started:

On an airplane:
* Ask for a few plastic cups and coffee cups for your child to stack and sort. Once that gets boring, crumble up a page of the in-flight magazine, hide it under one of the cups and start your own 3 cup monte game.
* Open up the sky mall magazine or safety card and ask your toddler to identify objects he recognizes.
* Show your toddler how to open and close the airplane seatbelt buckle (this kept my 1 year old entertained for over an hour).
* Turn the air sickness bag into a puppet.

In the car:
* Take an empty water bottle that you’ve tossed aside, fill it with a few coins and voila! You’ve got a limited edition Aquafina rattle.
* Give your child a map to “read,” so she can help navigate.
* Put your cell phone on speakerphone and leave group voicemails for family or friends – if you can get your little ones to sing a song, it’s always a big hit!

At a friend’s house or in a vacation rental:
* Engage in some old-fashioned fort-making with blankets and chairs.
* Take a full page picture from a magazine, cut it up and have your toddler put the pieces of the puzzle back together.
* Raid the kitchen for Tupperware, lids, and plastic cups for stacking, sorting, building, or banging – these can also double as bath toys. And you might have never guessed it, but measuring spoons make great rattles.

In a restaurant:
* Dump the little square packets of sugar, jam or margarine out onto the table and have your child try to stack them back inside the canister.
* Take the paper placemat and impress your child with your origami skills.
* See if your child can use chopsticks to transfer soy sauce packets from the table to a teacup.
* Ask for a lid and a straw and see if your toddler can pull the straw out and then poke it back through the lid.

With a little creativity, your make-shift toys can end up being just as fun for your child as anything you could purchase at a store.

If you have had your own MacGyver-worthy experiences creating toys on the fly, please share them with us!

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• Family Travel Tips for Roaming on a Budget