Road Tripping

I am home from vacation. I had a wonderful time, but now I think I need a vacation to recover from my vacation. I have had several people ask me already, "How was it driving fourteen hours with three kids?" You know...it wasn't as bad as I expected. It was long and boring and monotonous, but it was not the hell on Earth I had imagined...the hell on Earth it could have very easily become. The kids did amazingly well. As a matter of fact, any "issues" that arose were more with Ruanita and I than the kids. As a special treat, I thought I would give you a little taste of our trip.

Picture this....three kids crammed into the back of a Toyota Camry. Ruanita and I are sitting in the front with our seats pulled up so far that we are practically straddling the dashboard. We have to give the kids leg room in the back so that no one inadvertently touches anyone else, initiating a colossal wartime offensive somewhere in rural Illinois. I am driving. My eyes are beginning to glaze over, so I reach for some pick-me-up music to pop in the CD player. Much to the chagrin of my family, my go-to CD when I need to wake up on a long car drive is the original Broadway cast recording of RENT. Ruanita groans as I put it in the CD player. Soon, I am singing at the top of my lungs. Three hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes... Ruanita grumbles something about "listening to that damn CD one more time" and turns her head toward the window to pretend to sleep. From the back seat, I hear a tiny voice that says, "I have to pee." Initially, Ruanita and I both ignore the voice. It's Sophie and she has to pee every ten minutes, at least. However, this time ignoring her does not make it go away. Five minutes later, I hear a louder exclamation of "I have to pee." I reluctantly tell her that I will stop at the next exit with a nice, large gas station. Sophie responds with, "I can't wait. That'll take too long." I tell her she has no choice. She had just peed less than 20 minutes ago when we stopped for lunch, so I doubt she has reached a critical emergency stage just yet. I continue singing along to RENT. ....to sodomy that's between God and me, to S&M. La vie boheme..... Soon I hear another voice from the back seat saying "Mom." I answer "What?" Lucas chimes in with, "No, I meant the other mom." Lucas has never had an issue differentiating between Ruanita and I in the past. However, I guess when you get us all crammed in a car for 14 hours, it gets confusing. The entire way, every time Lucas said "Mom," the wrong mom responded....much to his obvious frustration. I turned the music down so Ruanita could respond. "Mom, do you want to hear a joke?" Oh no....not good. Lucas' jokes are barely bearable when we are relaxing at home. But trapped in a car with him?? Oh God...make it stop. We listen to a couple of jokes until Sophie has had enough. She screams, "Turn up the music!" Apparently, even RENT is better than a 7-year-old's jokes. A few more minutes pass and I realize that I hadn't heard anything from Nicholas in a while. I take a quick peek in the back seat, expecting to see him snoozing peacefully. Instead, I find him with his nose in a video game. Ruanita had brought along her Gameboy and the boys had been enraptured by it. I try talking to Nicholas to ask him if he is OK. No response. I ask him if he needs anything. No response. I ask him if he needs to pee. No response. OK then....I guess he is OK. As I turn to face the road again (a good thing to do when driving), Sophie pipes up from the back seat once more. This time she is thirsty. I explain that she doesn't need anything to drink since she has to pee and we have yet to pass an exit with a gas station that doesn't look like something out of a Stephen King movie. She immediately exclaims that she doesn't have to pee anymore. Hmmm...now how did that happen? I turn down the music again to discuss the finer points of roadside pee etiquette with my daughter.....to explain that "crying wolf" when it comes to urination needs on a 14-hour road trip will result in bad consequences for her. As I am explaining this to Sophie, Lucas suddenly begins belting out Christmas carols. Oh the weather outside is frightful.... What the hell?! Even Nicholas looks up momentarily from his video game to give Lucas a questioning glance. Someone please explain to me how Sophie and Nicholas never fail to fall asleep during the 5-minute ride to pick Lucas up from school in the afternoon, but on a 14-hour cross-country car drive they are all wide awake and caroling?! I have no choice but to turn RENT up and start singing again to drown out the Christmas carols. ...Let's open up a restaurant in Santa Fe. Sunny Santa Fe would be niiiiiiiice.....