We often travel to Wisconsin to visit my family. It is a 4 hour drive, so are always looking for ways to keep the kids busy and entertained.  Bill hates to stop, so it is a long four hours.  A great item to check out for car rides, bedtime, and really any time is the Giddio Audio Adventures.  We listened to the Billy Brown Goes Hiking CD on our drive home, and it was a life saver for us.  Will was super crabby, and the only thing that made him quit screaming was this CD.  It definitely holds your children’s attention.  It is geared towards kids aged 3 - 7 (though it worked on my 1 year old too!)  This is actually pretty cool.  Instead of a narrator reading a story, there is a full cast.  Everyone has their own voice.  I love that it makes my kids use their imagination.  I’m not the only one who likes this either — it has won several awards (Dr. Toy’s Best Products 2007, several iParenting media awards, and Creative Child magazine’s Seal of Excellence).  We ended up having to listen to it more than once, because they like it so much (run time is between 30 - 45 minutes depending on which CD you are listening to).

I love that you can even try this out.  If you go to their site, you can download Billy Brown And The Mystery Package for free!  You can also print off the CD covers and have your kids color them!  I highly recommend checking this out as a great alternative to TV!

Winnie The Pooh’s Sleepytime Hum is another great book for little ones.  It has awesome illustrations and is about Winnie the Pooh going to bed (which we want all our little ones to do).  This makes a great bedtime story.  The book is made from cardboard, so it is very durable.  It is short, so it keeps the attention of even the shortest attention spans.  It also tells you about why Pooh wants to go to sleep at night (he might even want to buy the moon) which hopefully will entice your little one to go to sleep. (If it doesn’t work for that, well it was worth the try, right?)  The whole book is a short little poem.  Each page has a picture and a couple lines of the poem.  Though my favorite has to be the last page:

Winnie is sleeping,
so you close your eyes, too!
Catch up with your dreams -
Pooh’s waiting for you!

A great bedtime book is Goodnight, Thumper. This book is about Thumper not being sleepy and going around the forest saying goodnight to everyone. Don’t you remember the days when we didn’t have to worry about weight loss diet pills and our biggest concern was staying awake as long as we could?  Since this is a Disney book, the illustrations are awesome.  They are so detailed and gorgeous.  This is a great book for any family that reads to their kids before bedtime.