I love to travel. I like visiting with friends and family, meeting new people, seeing new things and just the general thrill of doing something different – broadening my horizons. I even like traveling with the kids. Yes, it is a lot of work, but you know…it is a lot of work at home too! At least when I travel, I get to visit lots of cool places while I work!
We are currently on a BIG road trip. We are traveling in our van for a month long sojourn along the East Coast. We are visiting family and friends and lots of American History sites. Homeschooling gives us the great advantage of being able to travel like this – what a cool ending to our two years of American History studies. 
I will be posting more about how we do it, how I pack for a month long trip, how we travel with 9 children, how we visit major sites, what we do and how it works with so many little ones. This post is about the planning.
I probably started mentally preparing and planning the trip about 2 months in advance. Thinking about the people that we wanted to see and the main sites that I didn’t want to miss. I did not do anything formal, just started putting things together in my mind (while I was doing the laundry!). 
I was thinking about the ages of the kids, especially Nicholas, and what capabilities and sleeping patterns they would be at. These are critical points to consider for how the trip would go. How would each child be sleeping, how much walking could they do (especially the 2 -4 year olds), and how would everyone be eating. Again, most of the concerns would involve the baby and the littlest ones. 
Based on those thoughts, I decided to make sure that we did not encourage Nicholas (9months old now) to crawl, that I should start him on bits of table foods (so he could ”last a little longer” on a drive or busy day), and that I would not get him overly settled into a daily nap routine. A quick note about crawling babies: if avoidable, you do not want to travel with a crawling baby, you never know what is on the floors you will be visiting and a crawling baby has a taste for self mobility that really makes him/her intolerant of inactivity. So, if I could keep Nicholas from learning to crawl and get him feeding himself crackers or biter biscuits (and hopefully taking a sippy cup) all would be golden for him and the timing of the trip.
My thoughts and plans then lingered to the smaller children, how would things look for them and what could I do to make anything better. Main thing – put off potty training…diapers are great for trips! I would even consider putting my 3 year old back into diapers, actually all of them back into diapers! There is nothing that can fluster me faster than everyone or some of them having to go to the potty at a bad time! 
We then started working on drinking from a regular cup and sitting in regular chairs (for those times that we would be visiting with people that did not have “toddler friendly” ware. Of course, I also planned to bring some travel sippy cups, but I like to be ready for anything!
For all the kids, I started working hard on manners and general obediance. I tell the kids often that if they want to do fun stuff, they have to obey. We can’t go places and do things if they are not able to do what we tell them to do. I can’t even imagine how awful it would be if they all were routinely disobediant and didn’t follow our requests. We would definitely not be able to safely go places.
I also started talking to the kids about eating different foods and how to avoid some embarrassing situations (topics, questions, etc.)
About a month before the trip, I really started looking at the dates and pulling the schedule together. We started notifying friends and family and figuring out who would be available for visiting.
To be continued….
