Road to Go

We're heading off for a long drive tomorrow (3 hours). Since Rich won't be accompanying us, I thought Zack might need something to help keep him occupied in the car. We do have a portable DVD player, but Zack has been known to get car sick and has never made this particular trip without getting sick. Needless to say, I want something that will clean up fairly easy and will not be ruined should he get sick.

Somehow I had a stroke of genuis. Since I'm not spending any money on crafts this month, I found an old cookie sheet that never gets used because it's rusty. You can pick up a new cookie sheet for as little as $4 at Walmart if you don't have one lying around.

Spray paint your cookie sheet. I chose to use black. If your cookie sheet is rusty like mine, you may want to sand off the worst of the rust to eliminate the blotches you can see in the photos. I didn't really care about it, since I knew that I would be covering them.

I used my Silhouette to cut out the stop signs and the race track, then I used Mod Podge to adhere them to the cookie sheet. I'm a bit of a Mod Podge novice and didn't get all of the bubbles out, but I'm sure Zack won't mind having some bumps in his road. One down fall of my cookie sheet: because it was small, I was limited as to the road I could use and the signs didn't really fit on the road like I had envisioned. I had a plan of a more realistic traveling road/city, which I could have fit on a larger cookie sheet had I bought a sheet instead of using what was on hand. Oh, well. He'll never know the difference, right?

After using the item, I actually found that this was the perfect size. The cookie sheet fit perfectly on his lap and was just large enough to rest on the arm rests of his booster chair.

These Hotwheels are fairly new on the market-- they are magnetic! Zack loves that they will climb up doors. I will love that they will stick to the cookie sheet and not fall off as he's playing or when he puts it away, causing problems while we're trying to drive.

Seriously, they don't fall off! They do drive down the sheet with good ol' gravity working on them, but they don't fall when they're vertical.

I have plans for the back of the cookie sheet as well. I thought about checkers, tic-tac-toe, etc. but those games all require a second player. I came up with something that I think Zack will have a lot of fun with, but I haven't had time to create it, yet. I'm excited to surprise Zack with his new game tomorrow and will try to have the rest of it done for another surprise before our next long drive.

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