The Key Ingredient in a Restaurant Survival Bag for Toddlers!

Do you have a restaurant survival bag? If you have small children you know how hard trying to eat at a restaurant can be. A restaurant survival bag buys you time while you wait for your meals to come. It took a few years of trial and error before I found out the perfect combination for our restaurant survival bag. Read below to find out what the missing key ingredient was for us!

From zero to two years old, there are times when you may want to all together boycott going out with your children. I know I did! I can't tell you how many times after a stressful meal with our two kids I would say to my husband, "I am never going out to eat with them again." Does this sound familiar to you? It was rough. But then I found the key ingredient that changed everything. Playdough. Now we never go to dinner without it.

Here is everything I keep in our bag:

• homemade playdough in a ziplock baggie

• little dump truck (for my son)

• figurines (for my daughter)

• extra crayons

My son will make "rocks" to put into his dump truck, and my daughter often makes clothes for her figurines. Sometimes playdough turns into a sticky road and things get stuck in it. They can stick the crayons into it to make popsicles. They can use the knife on the table to cut the playdough. If we are at a sushi restaurant they stick their chopsticks into it and make it walk. I've made Elsa and Wall-E out of playdough, really anything goes. The great thing about playdough is it can be anything your child wants it to be!

I place all the above objects into a small clear bag and keep it in my car at all times. Whenever we go to a restaurant I grab our restaurant survival bag. If you don't already have playdough in your restaurant survival bag, or if you don't have a restaurant survival bag, make one right now! I promise you, your kids will thank you! Instead of crayons, I wish restaurants would make their own playdough and give it to kids, wouldn't that be cool!

I will be writing more about playdough and how it is the perfect material for process based art in my next blog post.