Part of living on the road is dealing with bugs and other critters.  We’ve had our fair share of spider bites, mosquito bites and ticks.  Just a normal day for a couple of adventurous little boys.   Not a big deal, at least not until now.  A week ago our oldest son came to me with a tick in his belly button that had been there for a while (he didn’t know how long – he hadn’t noticed it).  The day after it was removed he developed a rash.  The rash bothered me, so I took him to the doctor.  The doctor asked if he had experienced bad headaches, muscle aches, nausea, or loss of appetite.  He hadn’t, but the doctor decided to draw some blood and check for Lyme disease anyway, given that we had been traveling through Indiana, Illinois and Missouri recently.  The test came back negative, but two days later he had the chills, fever, headaches, muscle aches.  Now I was worried.  In the end, after a recheck, we got a prescription for Lyme disease.  We were fortunate to be able to fill the prescription at a Schnucks pharmacy.  For people who may not know, Schnucks has a Free Prescription Drug Program for generic oral antibiotics that includes up to a 21 day supply as well as refills of the following seven antibiotics:  Amoxicillin, Ampicillin, Ciprofloxacin (Generic for CIPRO), Doxycycline, Erythromycin, Penicillin, and Trimeth/Sulfa (Generic for SEPTRA or BACTRIM).  To find a Schnucks pharmacy near you, click here.

Today I thought I’d walk you through a typical day on the road so you can see what it’s really like.  We drove today, so let’s just pretend you’re coming along for the ride.  Our day started when we woke up, without an alarm clock.  Rarely do we need one these days and I don’t miss mine at all.  I am not a morning person and getting my little munchkins up at the crack of dawn when they still want to sleep is brutal.  Dad started the coffee and I fixed the kids breakfast.  They were quickly dressed and peering out the windows, looking to see who they could play with before we left.  Once they saw kids at the playground they were off.  While they played on the junglegym, which we could see from the front windows, we prepared to leave.  Here's what we had to do...

Our days are not always filled with touring. We may tour different attractions one or two days in a row and then stay at the campground for a day or two catching up on our book work, laundry, chores, etc. When the weather is bad we often stay in and watch a movie or let our imaginations run wild playing with the kids. I’m getting pretty good at playing “war”, we’ve made some really elaborate Lego houses and ships, and we build a mean fort out of dirty clothes.We’ve also had a lot of fun playing the games that we brought along. To save space (this would work for people with small houses anywhere) you can take the directions, the game board and the pieces out of the box and put them in a heavy duty zip lock bag, which now come in very large sizes. Here are our top ten games for the road.If you’ve never played one of these, try them. Several of them are great learning games, especially #3 and #1. I love it when the kids are having so much fun that they don’t realize they’re learning something!

10. Boggle
9. Cranium Hullabaloo
8. ThinkFun Rush Hour Jr.
7. Speed Stacks StackPack - Blue
6. UNO Card Game - Original
5. Apples to Apples Junior 9+ 2nd Edition
4. Scrabble Crossword Game
3. No Stress Chess
2. Blokus Trigon
1. Scrambled States