Four hours in the car. Three children. Zero screens. I understand if you don’t believe me, because two months ago I wouldn’t have believed me either.
We were driving south for the spring holidays, and somewhere in the packing chaos I threw the kids’ coloring books into the back seat. The ones made from last summer’s trip. Each kid got a book, a pencil case, and one of those lap desks that live in the boot.
Then something eerie happened. Silence. The good kind.
We drove to the next holiday
coloring in the last one.
{Tweet that.}
Somewhere past the second servo, I realised what was actually going on back there, and it was better than quiet. They were revisiting January on the way to September. My oldest was coloring the beach we were literally driving away from all our daily lives to replace. The retellings started up. The paddleboard incident got another airing. By the time we arrived, the holiday spirit had already been running for four hours.
Since then, the books have become standing travel equipment, and I’ve collected a small list of the places they earn their keep:
- Restaurants. The gap between ordering and food arriving is the most dangerous stretch of time in family life. A book and four pencils fixes it.
- Planes. A tray table is a desk. A book of your own memories is better in-flight entertainment than the seatback screen, and nobody has to wear headphones.
- Waiting rooms. Doctors run late. The book does not mind.
- Grandparents’ houses. Fills the strange first hour, and doubles as a guided tour of the trip they missed.
A practical note from a mistake we made once: pack the pencils somewhere reachable. A coloring book in the boot at 110 kilometres an hour is a cruel joke.
And one more trick. Before a big trip, we get the digital copy of the book as a PDF and print a few spare favourite pages, so there are loose sheets to hand around when one child colonises the whole book. The spares usually come home covered in scribble from the youngest, which is its own kind of souvenir.
Outline Origins books are A4, lie flat, and are built to survive back seats. Add the digital copy when you order and you can print backup pages within a day, which we recommend doing before school holidays, not during.
