5 days to go! We had a snowstorm over Friday and Saturday, and the weather is going to be rainy and cold all this week. Bring on the Hawaii sunshine!
I've been putting together the stuff for our kid's travel backpacks. We have a direct flight to Honolulu on the way, and we will be on the plane almost 9 hours. The airplane does not have the video screens on the back of the seats, so we don't have that in our favor. (Our flight back home is broken up into a 6 hour flight and almost 3 hours flight, and the longer segment does have the screens on the back of the seats--woohoo!).
For every flight we take, I always pack our kids' backpacks and make them wait until we are seated on the airplane until they open them to see what's inside. Usually, I only need stuff to entertain them for 3-4 hours. But based on the advice of a friend, I'm going with the "less is more" mentality for this trip and packing fewer things that are bigger or more meaningful in hopes they will spend more time on them.
The in-flight backpack entertainment is basically 3 categories--electronics, books/writing and toys.
Electronics--the kids each have old iPods that have games (for the boys) and a few videos loaded. They will also have access to a Kindle with Big Hero 6 on it (we saw this in the theater but not since). We also bought a re-charging thing that will re-charge each device once.
Toys--we are surprising the kids with one bigger toy we hope they will love. My oldest has wanted this transformer for a while now. I will have to take that Big Hero 6 toy out of the box to fit in my other son's backpack--I didn't realize it would be so big!
In the book and writing category, we got my younger son a 1st grade Brain Quest workbook and two smaller books. My older son gets a chapter book he's been wanting to read.
I also got a few of these Invisible Ink books for the boys. These take me back to when I was a kid doing road trips with my family!
My daughter will have a Palace Pets busy book (which contains some actual pet figurines), a paper doll set and a Color Wonder book.
DH is bringing a travel chess set that he can play with the boys. I am bringing 2 magazines, 2 books and an iPad...but I usually spend all my airplane time trying to keep the kids happy, so I have low expectations of actually reading any of the things I'm bringing.
And of course we will bring lots of food and snacks! The kids will each get a pez dispenser, as these are a tradition on our trips.