As for singing about bottles of beer, there was one trip where my son and I had to have a new noun for each round. 100 kettles of fish on the wall … 99 brilliant lights on the wall … 98 silly kids on the wall … 97 ridiculous dogs on the wall … 96 serious spiders on the wall … 95 knitting needles jammed in the wall … 94 fabulous books on the shelf … 93 scary rats in the walls … 92 bowls of cereal on the wall….

And, so on. Eventually, we got so silly we couldn’t breathe, driving was getting dangerous, and we ran out of ideas to top the other person’s last volley. Great, great fun.

Fiona does love to play the game, I forget what it’s called, where you go round and round with each person adding one word to the story and making all kinds of crazy things happen. I’m sure we’ll figure something out!

Dictionary stories. Bring along your Webster’s and begin telling stories from there. You open a random page and use one of the words from that page in your story. Once you have sufficiently developed your part (don’t end your part when you use the word…keep it going) you pass the dictionary to the next person for them to randomly choose a page. Or, you could stay on the same page and continue to use another word from the same page. You may want to pick up a youth dictionary.

20 questions is another game once you run out of stories. Chinese fire drill was loads of fun for me until my friends drove off without me. Cloud watching was one of my favorites too. Singing 100 bottles of beer on the wall was never one of my favorites but you could try and see how far you get. I usually lasted to about 94 and then knocked the singer out.

No, we won’t succumb to the electronic babysitting monster. We don’t have a TV in the car and she doesn’t own any electronic hand held games. Maybe a laptop with an educational online game here and there. Of course lots of books to read and music to listen to.

And Fiona loves calculations!

This is going to be so much fun!

Here’s what I think… LOTS of time to look out the window and make up stories. Silently. There aren’t enough hours and hours at a stretch to really work the imagination that deeply in our usual days.

Telling stories about the heroic deeds of people from history, including mythology.

Songs, of course.

Gas mileage calculation, calculations based on mileage signs, calculations of purchases….. (yes, 6 year olds can learn these calculations – and, bonus, it takes time for them to learn!)

How many people can you get to wave back to you in a 10 mile stretch? Can you beat it in the next 10 mile stretch? Does one kind of stimulus elicit more waves than another?

And, the license plate anagram exercise … LNG 341 = Lovely Night Gowns.