10 things you’ll only understand if you’ve travelled 200km with a toddler

Take your toddler on a long road trip said…. NO ONE EVER!!

Toddlers and extensive car rides are a lethal combination, especially if said toddler is my son, who charges at the highest octane humanly possible. He needs to be ‘run’, like a dog, until he crashes (we toyed with bringing our treadmill on our family trip so we could run him silly while we clocked up the miles, but the boot of our Mazda CX-8 just couldn’t quite accommodate it).

If you’ve ever been as insane as myself to attempt such a laughable feat, you will totally relate to the below:

1. Bribing your small person with sweet treats starts off as a truly fabulous idea and buys you a little silence… to start with. However, once the sugar hits their guts they transform into a confined rabid pup, and the noise volume and car seat thrashing becomes rather alarming

2. You will listen to the same song on repeat for pretty much the whole trip. “Play it again, play it again!” will be squealed at least 342 times and all you can do is abide.

3. After a quick pit stop for a petrol top up and quick wizz, the child that literally insisted they didn’t need to go to the loo decides 10 minutes back into the trip that he is about to explode from a full bladder.

4. The altered/dumbed-down version of Eye Spy is the one thing being spied every single time. This will always be a tree. Always!

5. Your car will be trashed within 3 minutes. Lego pieces, books, wrappers, wet ones, tissues, you name it, will cover the floor, back seat and beyond.

6. You will convince yourself that it will be a device-free trip – you fool! The second you reach the first freeway, you’re piffing your phone/ipad into their mini hands as quickly as your arms will allow you to move.

7. (And even though you were going to do the trip device-free, you loaded up the iPad with your kids’ fave flicks… just in case. Even though at home he watches those movies on an infuriatingly repeated cycle, on this particular day he insists he hates them all.)

8. You are so stressed from the whole situation that even the way that your partner is breathing drives you insane.

9. You realise that the trip you organised that has turned your hair wiry grey, is not one the devil child is even going to remember.

10. When the eyes of the beast in the backseat finally close, you are too nervous to breathe, talk or even blink. The silence is a form of nerve- wracking bliss.

If you are thinking of road tripping with a toddler - Don’t. The local park will do the trick.

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