This post may contain affiliate links. Read our disclosure policy here. Deals are current as of date and time posted.
So my original plan was to write a post about things we learned TO DO on our road trip with Livia, but I think we learned more of what NOT to do, so here are our top 5 road trip fails:
- DO NOT skip the normal bedtime routine. “Oh, it’s already late,” we said, “Let’s just skip the bath for tonight,” we said, “It’ll be fine,” we said. Never. Again. This was definitely our top fail, so if you don’t read this entire post, read this one. It could save you your sanity. This terrible line of thinking resulted in baby not getting to sleep until after midnight and then waking up every hour. Every hour. Until 7 the next morning, when she finally thought she might need more than one hour of sleep at once. Of course, this also just happened to be the time we wanted to get on the road.
- DO NOT rule out the possibility of the biggest diaper blow out of your baby’s life. I mean it’s inevitable, right? Of course this will happen, and when you are low on wipes, to boot. Picture a CVS parking lot, wipes, clothes, and other casualties of the blowout scattered on the ground, husband holding a naked baby. This is the scene I came out of the store to see after going in to get more wipes. I obviously had a “What the heck?” look on my face because Alex turns to me with a horrified look and says “You have no idea.” I mean, all you can do is laugh, right?
- After this huge blow out, DO NOT take your car seat apart to wash the padding without paying close attention to the inner workings of how the harnesses connect in the back. In fact, don’t even take it apart, just wipe it down really well. After throwing it in the washing machine, we realized we were going to leave to go visit his grandmother, and obviously needed the car seat. This resulted in Alex swinging it around outside to try to dry it out, Livie sitting on a trash bag we put between her and the seat to try to keep her from getting wet, and the harness of the car seat not working exactly right until we asked friends to send us pictures of the back of theirs. Clorox wipes and Fabreeze would have saved us from all of this!
- And still along the lines of diaper changes… DO NOT expect all changing tables to be the same. By the end of the trip we were changing her in the car rather than even bothering with public restroom changing tables. For one, there are still rarely changing tables in men’s restrooms (I thought this was an issue like 3 years ago and companies were starting to put them in men’s rooms. Apparently, not.) Secondly, even clean restaurants can have the most DISGUSTING changing tables. After seeing several, we just didn’t even bother to take her into the restroom.
- DO NOT leave new products you are bringing with you in the box. They will take up A LOT more space in the car when they are in the box. We received a portable high chair that could be strapped on to a regular kitchen table chair at one of our baby showers, and hadn’t used it yet. It was still in the box, so we just packed it up in the car like that. We already felt like we were taking our whole house with us, so with this big box, our car was busting at the seams. After unpacking it a few nights later we realized that box was at least two times as big as the actual high chair. It definitely cleared out a lot of space in our car for the second leg of our trip!
Luckily, other than these few fails, the road trip went pretty smoothly, and Livie did a great job in the car and in a different environment. Any other advice for road trips with babies? Leave them in the comments!
