There are four pairs of shoes in my car.

There are baseball cleats for today’s game, slippers for my son to wear after school, running shoes so I can get in a jog while the kids are getting their exercise, and a pair of kids’ Crocs from last night when I carried the little one in to bed after he fell asleep on the car ride home.

There are five plastic containers and three sets of utensils from breakfast eaten on the way to school. There are two sets of pajamas, two karate gi, a baseball uniform and a set of workout clothes for me.

Like so many other commuters on this island, every morning we pack up the car for a long trip through traffic and the day’s events. Once we leave our home in Pearl City, we’re not venturing back through traffic for a forgotten water bottle or a gi for karate class if it’s raining and baseball is canceled. So we bring everything — everything we might need every day.

Sometimes it feels like I live in my car. To passers-by, it certainly looks like I do.

I know we’re not alone. It takes us an hour to get from home to the kids’ schools in town, longer for the evening commute. But many on the island have a much worse drive than that.

Honolulu regularly ranks on top-10 lists for the nation’s worst commutes. In March, navigation company TomTom ranked Honolulu the eighth-worst city in the U.S. for traffic congestion.

Grandma’s house in Kaimuki is our oasis. We make near-daily stops there to get ready for our next activity, have a bite to eat, take a shower, spend some downtime. I know we’re lucky in this regard. Many commuters don’t have a home away from home, a place to wait out the chaos when traffic snarls. But eventually we must head home.

Spending an average of 18 hours a week in the car, I try to make the most of every minute.

I have snacks in the car, school supplies for doing homework on the go, and coloring books and tablets to keep the kids from wondering aloud if we are there yet and how much longer.

I have an arsenal of car games, some of them learned on the long road-trip vacations of my childhood that we now play on our regular commute: We play I Spy and race to find the letters of the alphabet on road signs and license plates. Other times we play games the boys create: We use metaphors to describe the view out the window. We make up detailed stories about family adventures that never happened.

Of course there are books in the back seat for the boys to read silently until the daylight fades. And then I cue up the audio books. We recently finished “The Indian in the Cupboard” and are working our way through the six-CD set of “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.” The CDs provide a bedtime story when we won’t make it home in time to squeeze in an evening reading session.

And when all of that has grown old, no matter how much I try to keep the car clean, my younger boy manages to produce a Happy Meal toy that he keeps tucked in some nook in the back seat. By the time we get home, it has vanished again into its hiding spot.

Tonight we’ll clean out the mess and tomorrow we’ll start all over again.

“She Speaks” is a weekly column by the women writers of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Reach Donica Kaneshiro at dkaneshiro@staradvertiser.com.