Homemade Travel Gift Ideas for Kids

Do you remember taking trips when you were a child? I remember roadtrips when I was really little and my parents would take out the middle row of seats in our car and make a big bed with blankets and pillows.  We had this cool mini tv with a built in VHS player that weighed like 40 lbs.  It was a great set-up.  In addition to the cush video set-up, my mom would also wrap presents for us and give them to us every hour or so.   Well times sure have changed.  I don't make a slumber party in the car but I do still wrap presents for long drives.  I have tried wrapping up a bunch of dollar store gifts but they don't seem to hold the attention of the kids for very long.  This past trip we went on I opted for quality over quantity.  I made a few homemade gifts and interspersed them with some DVD's, store bought toys and  treats.  Here are the travel gifts I came up with:

I really wanted to make these cute wooden flower children that I saw here.  I had them pinned forever and I thought this would be a perfect time.  Only problem was I didn't have the wooden dolls with the straight bodies.  I had some with curved bodies but they just wouldn't fit well in the leaves.  I couldn't get over how cute they were though so I made my own with fabric.

 I gave each of them a coordinating felt flower on top of their heads.  I drew the faces on with a black and pink sharpie marker.  Each girl got two flower babies in their present.

The next gift was a marshmallow toothpick building kit.   I am sure you have seen them and your kids have done them.  My kids never had.  Since they hadn't, I wanted to give them some instructions to point them in the right direction.  My oldest daughter can read but my youngest can't so I opted for picture instructions instead.  The kit consisted of a ziplock bag filled with marshmallows, pointy toothpicks, and a picture instruction sheet.

The instruction sheet had picture diagrams that showed a bunch of different shapes to make,

step-by-step pictures of how to build a marshmallow and toothpick cube and pyramid,

and a step-by-step pictures to build a 3-D Marshmallow and toothpick house.

The last homemade gift I made for my kids was a personalized travel journal.  

These turned out to be such a fun and cute keepsake.  I made the books with my Bind-It-All machine.  They had blank white computer paper inside and a chipboard cover.  My youngest daughter just drew in her book but my oldest used it as a journal and documented the different places we went.  She drew pictures and wrote little sentences about what she saw.  What a keepsake!! It is so precious to see the different things she observed.

Does anyone else do presents for car rides?

Do you need more travel or Disney ideas? Check out this Disney wrap-up post!